There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
Interpretation
This quote distinguishes between talented writers who convey deeper truths and those who write primarily from personal experience.
Clifton Fadiman's quote highlights the dichotomy in the writing world between those who are able to articulate universal truths and insights that resonate with readers and those who focus solely on their personal narratives. The implication is that great writing transcends the individual and connects with broader human experiences, while lesser writing tends to be more self-referential and limited in scope.
In practice
During a writer's workshop, one could use this quote to discuss the importance of authenticity in writing.
To read in bed is to draw around us invisible, noiseless curtains. Then at last we are in a room of our own and are ready to burrow back, back to that private life of the imagination we all led as a child and to whose secret satisfactions so many of us have mislaid the key.
One measure of friendship consists not in the number of things friends can discuss, but in the number of things they need no longer mention.
Insomnia is a gross feeder. It will nourish itself on any kind of thinking, including thinking about not thinking.
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke - and that the joke is oneself.
When you reread a classic, you do not see more in the book than you did before; you see more in you than there was before.
A sense of humor is the ability to understand a joke-and that the joke is oneself.
Happy is the novelist who manages to preserve an actual love letter that he received when he was young within a work of fiction, embedded in it like a clean bullet in flabby flesh and quite secure there, among spurious lives.
Repertory theater is all about being part of the whole, one of the many colors in this vast palette.
I realized with Broadway everything written for black people is usually written in the past, and I'm kind of a contemporary guy. I don't think you want to see me in 'Raisin in the Sun'.
Yes sir. You can be more careless, you can put more trash in [a novel] and be excused for it. In a short story that's next to the poem, almost every word has got to be almost exactly right. In the novel you can be careless but in the short story you can't. I mean by that the good short stories like Chekhov wrote. That's why I rate that second - it's because it demands a nearer absolute exactitude. You have less room to be slovenly and careless. There's less room in it for trash.
I've returned to being an amateur without any ties or strings attached, which gives me a freedom I never had before.
Photography in our time leaves us with a grave responsibility. While we are playing in our studios with broken flowerpots, oranges, nude studies and still lifes, one day we know that we will be brought to account: life is passing before our eyes without our ever having seen a thing.
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