I don't believe that a writer has "duties": it is enough for a writer to do their job well.
Recognising the power of words he insists, "It is the writer's duty to tell the terrible truth, and it is a reader's civic duty to learn this truth".
The writer's duty, said Greene, was to be "a piece of grit in the state machinery".
Chinua Achebe, last year's recipient of the Man Booker International Prize for Fiction, said that the writer's duty "is to explore the human condition".
Here the celebrated Polish foreign correspondent invokes the writer's duty to exile himself, at least temporarily, by going out into the world and meeting "the Other" face-to-face.
Maxine's two children, Sarah and Davy, are stand-ins (though of the opposite sex) for Tom, the aspiring writer and duty-bound son in "Menagerie," and Laura, his crippled, emotionally challenged sister.
The forefather of today's "boom" in Nigerian - and other African - fiction matched his scorching critique of corrupted power with a fervent affirmation of the writer's duty to defy it: "it is the story that outlives the sound of war-drums".
I'm certain that, Joyce's genius apart, it was the particular demands of the novella, the way it lays on the writer a duty of unity and the pursuit of perfection, that brought him to shape in this fashion one of the loveliest fictions in the English language.
Our mode is realism, "realistic" is synonymous with "prosaic," and the prose writer's duty is to suppress not only rhyme but any verbal accident that would mar the textural correspondence to the massive, onflowing impersonality that has supplanted the chiming heavens of the saints.
Although his report on this "accomplished little city" is lively and evocative, it's possible that his preoccupation with the artist and the creative process distracted him from his travel writer's duty to give the reader a distinct taste of a particular spot, and somewhat distorted his judgment.
