Home > Topic > A great writer
1 " Here's what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader's armor, a cardinal's vestments. Let me feel the pygmy's heartbeat, the queen's breast, the torturer's pleasure, the Nile's taste, or the nomad's thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back. "
― Pat Conroy , My Reading Life
2 " Be a great writer when you write your life's song. "
3 " The name of a great writer is usually bigger than the title of his book. Both literally and figuratively. "
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana , N for Nigger: Aphorisms for Grown Children and Childish Grown-ups
4 " I never tried to ingratiate myself with great writers. When a great writer has nothing to say, he does something else, like chopping firewood. A great writer doesn't try to find something to write about, he only writes when he has to. I was no great writer. I've always had the need to unload my thoughts, and so had to live with a kind of mental incontinence, but I've never felt forced to write a novel. Nor, for that matter, have I ever chopped firewood. "
― Jostein Gaarder
5 " Every writer on this planet THINKS he is a great writer (why waste your entire life writing when you believe you are mediocre?) but its deemed socially unacceptable to actually speak out such thoughts. So, modesty is always a public concept and not an inner one. For that reason alone 'modesty' can actually be said to be the product of a large ego, for the ego is primarily concerned with survival and society rewards this dishonesty and tends to punish honesty (see Camus) "
― Martijn Benders
6 " You cannot be a great writer in a shop where words are sold in tens and twenties. "
― Rick Aster
7 " Author Toni Morrison swats aside other possible sources of her success and says that the ONLY reason she is a great writer is because when she walked into a room as a child her father's face lit up. "
― Donald Miller , Searching for God Knows What
8 " For a country to have a great writer is to have another government. "
9 " The creations of a great writer are little more than the moods and passions of his own heart, given surnames and Christian names, and sent to walk the earth. "
― W.B. Yeats
10 " For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones. "
