Country Quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor…

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

For a country to have a great writer is to have another government.

— Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

“A great writer is, so to speak, a second government in his country. And for that reason no regime has ever loved great writers,…

— Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Writing tends to be very deliberate. A novelist could probably run a military campaign with some success. They could certainly run a country.

— Colm Toibin

Most writers live in self-imposed exile, even when they don't leave their country. They prefer the undiscovered country inside their own heads.

— Anthony McCarten

A writer without his country is nothing.

— Marek Hlasko

“Writers rarely set out to be national writers. They need small, intimate worlds, full of details; the macro scale of countries, especially those as…

— Saadat Hasan Manto

We need a more complex understanding of writers working under authoritarian or repressive regimes. Something to replace this simpleminded, Cold War-ish equation in which…

— Pankaj Mishra

a writer is a foreign country

— Marguerite Duras

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

— James M. Cain

Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.

— Irwin Shaw

Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible... The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.

— Ismail Kadaré