Pastoral Resources

Directors and writers have a lot of stress as well, because they have people they answer to.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.

A storyteller is basically what actors and writers are.

In fact, I think for a lot of writers, it's so hard to be read.

Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.

I think film had a terrible effect on horror fiction particularly in the 80s, with certain writers turning out stuff as slick and cliched as Hollywood movies.

Great writers are the saints for the godless.

Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.

My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

Recipe writers hate to write about heat. They despise it. Because there aren't proper words for communicating what should be done with it.

Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.

I think my fascination is less with genre figures than with writers in general.

Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual.

Writers will happen in the best of families.