Past Quote by Chang-Rae Lee

I think writers write for their consciences, they write for their own true audiences, for their souls.

— Mo Yan

Histories never conclude; they just pause their prose. Their stories are, if they are truthful, untidy affairs, resistant to windings-up and sortings-out. They beat…

— Simon Schama

I don't know if a novelist ever fully detaches him- or herself from what they wrote and the way they wrote it. I can…

— Scott Turow

Writers serve as the memory of a people. They chew over our public past.

— Annie Dillard

For the innocent, the past may hold a reward. But for the treacherous, it's only a matter of time before the past delivers what…

— Anonymous

Novel-writing can be a cold-blooded business. One uses whatever happens to be lying around in memory and employs it to suit one’s end….Then, again,…

— Anonymous

I don't think writers change the past any more than other people do, except in so far as we may mine our lives and…

— Marge Piercy

The past seems to infuse into the present, and in the brown, wringled faces of the old people one sees the presence of the…

— Rudolfo Anaya

I think that writers are, at best, outsiders to the society they inhabit. They have a kind of detachment, or try to have.

— John Irving

If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before, they were not noticed; now they are.

— Tom Wolfe

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

— F. Sionil Jose

I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving…

— Guillermo Cabrera Infante