Accepting Quote by Valeria Luiselli

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

Writers matter in a society to the extent that we can help that society hear its unvoiced longing, encounter its erased and disregarded selves,…

— Adrienne Rich

As a writer one doesn’t belong anywhere. Fiction writers, I think, are even more outside the pale, necessarily on the edge of society. Because…

— William Trevor

It's OK just to be a writer, who writes about the society in which he lives and the issues that most important. Now how…

— Arundhati Roy

I've never really felt that being part of a literary community is all that important. It can be extremely detrimental to a writer. It…

— Pankaj Mishra

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

We all have our opinions. But I suspect that writers are actually less worth heeding, because they regard themselves as so uniquely important, so…

— Simon Hoggart

There's always this sense of incredulity that writers feel, because they're usually living flat and ordinary lives, because they have to.

— Doris Lessing

Novelists are no more moral or certain than anybody else; we are ideologically adrift, and if we are any good then our writing will…

— Andrew O'Hagan

Writers are interesting people, but often mean and petty.

— Lillian Hellman

The time has come for writers to become inaccessible again. The reason is not some kind of 'mystique' that makes people curious (though it…

— Andrei Codrescu

“There is a deeper, more profound reason for this craving for acceptance and glory. Put simply, it's because all writers are fat and/or ugly.…

— Chancery Stone