Words matter. These are the best Writer Quotes from famous people such as Marguerite Yourcenar, David Mamet, Paul Thomas Anderson, Nanci Griffith, Mickey Spillane, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.
A stage play is basically a form of uber-schizophrenia. You split yourself into two minds – one being the protagonist and the other being the antagonist. The playwright also splits himself into two other minds: the mind of the writer and the mind of the audience.
I think my job is to try and be as honest as I can with what is in my mind and how I feel – I think that’s what you’re supposed to do, if you’re a good writer. So I try to do that. I know I do that. I do do that.
Even though my songs may sound very personal, to me most of them are fiction. It is a great way for me to be able to live a fantasy life as a writer because I get to be someone else, someplace else for three and a half minutes, just like the listener.
I’m a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.
I began running on an everyday basis after I became a writer. As being a writer requires sitting at a desk for hours a day, without getting some exercise you’d quickly get out of shape and gain weight, I figured.
Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!
Well, to be honest I think I’m a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought – whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.
As coaches, we learn to accept criticism for our decisions. If a writer says you shouldn’t have gone for it on fourth-and-one, we understand that’s part of the job. We expect it.
You need to keep something for yourself. As a writer, I feel that even more strongly. I feel like I need to be able to freely observe the world. That’s the way I like to move through the world; I don’t need to be the focus of attention. If I am, it impairs my ability to write and to do what I do.
A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.
The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream.
There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call ‘the breaks.’ In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things – read and write – and wait.
I think my best quality as a writer is the ability to craft complicated, nuanced, interesting characters.
A film writer is very much like a party girl. While you’re good-looking and still unlined, the possibilities seem endless. But your appeal doesn’t last long and you’re quickly discarded.
The Architect is just one of a series of works which examine the confrontation of innocence and experience, illustrating the complex ethics of power that exist between reader and writer, critic and artist, the human and the divine.
Thinking about death makes you analyse what life is. Anxiety makes you curious, and curiosity leads to understanding. I wouldn’t be a writer without depression.
I’m a writer. I don’t support any war. That’s my principle.
And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.
My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer’s block, as if it was some kind of illness.
It must be extremely uncomfortable to live with a writer – all that preoccupation and brooding.
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
I eventually want to do writing on all the films, but not necessarily to be the writer. Writing is a painful, painful thing; it really is.
I love Maira Kalman. She’s an amazing illustrator and writer. I’ve loved her since I was in college, but when I moved to New York and experienced the same city she was drawing and writing about, I developed a whole new appreciation. Her work made me observe everything so much deeper and more joyfully.
I could have been a cult writer if I’d kept writing surrealistic novels. But I wanted to break into the mainstream, so I had to prove that I could write a realistic book.
A writer doesn’t write about just anything. He writes about things he has an affinity for.
The interesting thing about fiction from a writer’s standpoint is that the characters come to life within you. And yet who are they and where are they? They seem to have as much or more vitality and complexity as the people around you.
I was a writer. I couldn’t sell anything, and the comedians were among the dumbest people I had ever met. They’d all say to me, ‘The average man won’t understand it.’ You know, they’re superior to the average man.
‘True Romance’ was definitely, in part, still me finding my voice as a writer. I was nervous, and I was a lot more shy. The album sounds bruised.
As a writer, I’m more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
I guess my music career is my personal life. You know, I’ve always been a writer who wants to write about my experiences. And so this experience being added to that, I – I want to live extraordinary experiences. And when I give advice to people, I want it to be sage advice.
A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.
Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
I was very pleased, obviously, to have outsold such great writers. But I’m not insane – I do realize that I am a popular writer who people buy to take on vacation.
I’m a writer; as soon as I imagine what would happen if I found the fountain of youth, it turns into a dystopia in my head.
Inside of all the makeup and the character and makeup, it’s you, and I think that’s what the audience is really interested in… you, how you’re going to cope with the situation, the obstacles, the troubles that the writer put in front of you.
What writer wants to make compromises with story? Story is the only reason you’re in it.
I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person… to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as writer and also as oral communicator.
Before I ever heard about ’60 Minutes,’ I had been a writer, a columnist for ‘Life’ magazine and for ‘Newsweek’ – that was about as high as you could get in column writing. I care about my writing. I’m not a quack-quack TV journalist.
I’m lucky enough to work with, I think, the greatest writer there’s ever been, Shakespeare. Whose collected works would always be under my pillow if I was only ever allowed one book to keep, and who never bores me.
The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.
I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.
For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.
An absolutely necessary part of a writer’s equipment, almost as necessary as talent, is the ability to stand up under punishment, both the punishment the world hands out and the punishment he inflicts upon himself.
I knew from the age of seven that I was meant to be a writer.
Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?
I’m first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can’t say why I’m one.
Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.
I learned that the only way you are going to get anywhere in life is to work hard at it. Whether you’re a musician, a writer, an athlete or a businessman, there is no getting around it. If you do, you’ll win – if you don’t, you won’t.
In journalism just one fact that is false prejudices the entire work. In contrast, in fiction one single fact that is true gives legitimacy to the entire work. That’s the only difference, and it lies in the commitment of the writer. A novelist can do anything he wants so long as he makes people believe in it.
I never considered myself a writer. I’m a teacher. In a way, I feel kind of… kind of guilty for all the people who are writers who hope to be on the best-seller list someday, who live for that and don’t get it, and it came to me as a kind of free gift, like God coming to Abraham and announcing, ‘I’ve chosen you!’
I tried to get people at ‘South Park’ into ‘Downton Abbey,’ and it didn’t work. I think they were like, ‘Downton Abbey?’ What?’ And I kinda made a big plea in the writer’s room, like, ‘Guys, you should really watch it. It’s good. It’s addicting. My wife and I are obsessed with it.’
A writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence.
‘Between Shades of Gray’ is a story of astonishing force. I feel grateful for a writer like Ruta Sepetys who bravely tells the hard story of what happens to the innocent when world leaders and their minions choose hate and oppression. Beautiful and unforgettable.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
I don’t think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.
To me the only real star of the movie is the writer. And I work with writers very closely, from outline to first draft and on to the seventh draft, whatever it takes. Then my job is to support the director to make the best movie we can. Some producers try to go past them, but my job is to support them.
I never get writer’s block, but I do have days where I crawl under the duvet.
The human life is all one thing, like a blade tracing loops on the ice: a little kid, a twenty-three-year-old infantry sergeant, a middle-aged writer knowing guilt and sorrow.
I won’t talk or deal with a young writer unless I sense he has utterly given his life over to it. It’s a waste of my time. If they don’t feel ‘called’ – why in God’s name would you do this?
I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers.
I never thought of myself as a writer.
Celebrity is a word that I find offensive. That’s the c-word. I hate it. It means no discernible talent. It means all you want is to be famous. It doesn’t mean you’re a writer, an actor, a mime. I think I wanna not be a celebrity.
Nabokov, who I loved more than any other writer when I was young, had such contempt for dialogue. When I was younger, I never wrote a word of dialogue because of him. I thought it was a childish part of a novel.
A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas, and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.
People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.
I think the true artist – musician, dancer, writer, actor – a true artist is able to sort of articulate pain and tragedy, in a way that sort of expresses what the listener or the beholder may have been feeling but was less able to communicate.
You’re isolated as a writer, so I always envied people who could get up early and drive to work and fit into society.
Nashville, there’s people that are ten times more talented than me, ten times better singer than me, song writer than me, but for some reason you get the ball, and now – and now you run with it. And you do the best you can.
It’s always hard when you’re playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There’s a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone’s idea of that.
If a writer doesn’t generate hostility, he is dead.
For any writer, the ability to look at a sentence and see what’s superfluous, what can be altered, revised, expanded, and, especially, cut, is essential. It’s satisfying to see that sentence shrink, snap into place, and ultimately emerge in a more polished form: clear, economical, sharp.
Whatever you do, make sure you want to write more than you want to be a writer. Make sure you want to act more than you want to be an actor. That is what will sustain you.
I’m not patient at all. I avoid writer’s block by writing. I power through with a bad version, so I can move on, and usually once I’ve gotten to the next scene, I’ll discover what was missing from the bad version scene. Then I can easily rewrite it to get back on the right path.
The travel writer seeks the world we have lost – the lost valleys of the imagination.
If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.
I’m a fast writer.
A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression.
For a writer, they say write what you know. As a performer, you find it in yourself, in your heart. You relate to the character. You try to live it, try to have it be real for you.
I’m a dad, I’m a husband, I’m an activist, I’m a writer and I’m just a student of the world.
The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.
The writer is the visionary of his people… He anticipates, he warns.
Every writer I know has trouble writing.
I trained as a writer before I became a lawyer. I was headed for a life as an English professor, but that just wasn’t me. I’m not a scholar; I didn’t have a scholar’s attitude toward literature.
A writer who presents men and women as creatures truncated below the waist is exposed as one who goes about without his trousers saying, ‘see, I have had my testicles removed.’
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader.
A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.
Life experiences inherently change you as a writer. My sense of fury calmed down when I had children and found a loving partner.
Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, ‘I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.’
You want an audience. If you didn’t, you wouldn’t be a writer. The biggest motivation to write is the knowledge that someone will read it.
I wanted to write a novel where the meaning is in the story and characters and the subliminal, in the shades and nuances. It’s exciting to develop that as a writer.
I’d always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.
For a writer, published works are like fallen flowers, but the expected new work is like a calyx waiting to blossom.
I write music all the time. When I talk about having writer’s block, it’s more to do with lyrics than anything else.
I’ve been writing since I was very young, even before I was a teenager. As far as I’m concerned, I am a writer – whether my writing’s spoken or written in a blog, paper, book or printed on the side of a submarine.
To be misunderstood can be the writer’s punishment for having disturbed the reader’s peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.
I’m not the fastest writer. I can’t just crank out ideas that are good enough.
I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don’t think there’s a single writer who influences me.
No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud’s own writing.
I’m a singer, a writer and an actress – when I find something that I feel good enough about doing.
You have to remember that I was a bright but simple fellow from Canada who seldom, if ever, met another writer, and then only a so-called literary type that occasionally sold a story and meanwhile worked in an office for a living.
I am honorary President of the American Humanist Society, having succeeded the late, great science fiction writer Isaac Asimov in that utterly functionless capacity. We Humanists behave as well as we can, without any rewards or punishments in an Afterlife.
A writer’s job is to tell the truth.
Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others.
When you’re editing, you want to be the perfect appreciator, not another writer.
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
When I was at the ‘Philadelphia Inquirer,’ I was promoted nine times in my first 13 years. I ultimately went from general assignment to beats on St. Joe’s and Temple, to backup writer, to NBA writer, to NBA columnist, to, ultimately, in 2003, to general sports columns.
I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them – without a thought about publication – and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
I suppose I’m most influenced by any good, commercial writer. I learn from everyone.
It took me six novels before I felt confident of my voice as a writer.
I’ve been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper.
I mean, the problem is, I think I’m a great writer.
Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.
As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
I’m a better writer than a performer. Everyone wants to feel like they’re a bit of a polymath, and I certainly feel that.
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
I’m the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.
But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.
A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you’re communicating what you think you’re communicating. It’s so easy as a young writer to think you’re been very clear when in fact you haven’t.
If you’re a writer, write. You just keep writing. And if you’re a filmmaker, you keep doing what you can to keep telling your stories; you don’t stay on the one. Keep moving forward and doing what you can to tell whatever story you can tell, be it via writing, be it via filming it.
I wanted to do – there was this film called ‘Magic’ that Anthony Hopkins did. And the director wanted me. The writer wanted me. Joe Levine said no, I don’t want any comedians in this.
Minister and writer Barbara Kaufmann has addressed the subject of guerrilla decontextualization on both the ‘Voices Compassionate Education’ website and on ‘Inner Michael’, where she offers the kind of insights into the spiritual aspects of Michael Jackson’s creative artistry that mainstream media mostly ignores.
I don’t remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.
I think I would have done very well as a writer in the Forties. I think the last time America was a great country was then or not long after. It was before Vietnam, before Watergate.
I was a writer. I just wasn’t a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I’d be a better actor than I would a playwright.
By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.
The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.
Tina Fey, a performer and head writer for ‘Saturday Night Live,’ has deftly adapted Rosalind Wiseman’s nonfiction dissection of teenage girl societal interaction, ‘Queen Bees and Wannabes: Helping Your Daughter Survive Cliques, Gossip, Boyfriends and Other Realities of Adolescence.’
I find myself wanting to make music at the dining room table or in the bedroom – I’m kind of a mobile writer, so I sort of move around the house. But the attic is definitely where I can make the most noise. While everyone on the lower floors screams ‘Earthquake!’ But no! It’s just my bass!
I feel like I spend most of my time in a state of writer’s block! When things do come out, they come out quickly.
But while I was working with my team to conceptualize ‘White Night’, we hit writer’s block and couldn’t come up with a single that I felt would resonate with listeners.
If you are a serious writer or just a normal one, in one way or another, you are writing in the service of freedom. All writers know, understand, or dream that their work will be in the service of freedom.
I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he’s writing about. I think, you just can’t move them about, you know.
The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence.
The important thing is to do what you most love in the best way. If you love literature, you could be a great writer and perhaps one day become a Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature.
A good journalist, as you know, is a great listener. And so’s a good writer. And I got to listen to people for almost 20 years. That serves me well, I hope, when I try to understand how a character might be feeling, or how they might react.
From Graham Greene, I learnt how to be an accessible writer who grapples with our doubts as sentient individuals.
I’m a fast writer.
I have to understand what my strengths and limitations are, and work from a true place. I try to do this as best I can while still protecting my writer self, which more than ever needs privacy.
Medicine is probably one of the best backgrounds for a writer to find stories. I always think cops and docs have the best background because we see so much of human behavior, such a range of human emotions.
Nostalgia is a sweet place for a poet and writer to be in. But it’s an indulgence; a distraction. You can’t live in a distraction.
The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
Fiction makes your dreams come true, and, as a writer, fiction allows you to delve into the area of miracles.
The sentences I write have their roots in song and poetry, and take their bearings from music and painting, as much as from the need to impart mere information, or mirror anything. I am not a realist writer, even if I seem like one.
I read tons of comic books. My favourite is Grant Morrison, a Scottish comic writer.
I really wasn’t equipped to be a writer when I left Oxford. But then I set out to learn. I’ve always had the highest regard for the craft. I’ve always felt it was work.
A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.
And I think a good writer’s gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it.
I’m not a born writer, and I don’t enjoy writing.
Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition.
As a story writer, you have work with sharp but relatively small tools, the picks of metaphor, the shovel blade of images, the trowel of point of view, and then you delicately lift and brush in the revision with love and care knowing that one slip, and you might damage an extremely delicate thing.
A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom.
I’m a writer more than I am a talker.
You become a different writer when you approach a short story. When things are not always having to represent other things, you find real human beings begin to cautiously appear on your pages.
Being rich would be disastrous for me as a writer. I have always needed to write to pay the bills.
It is the sincere desire of the writer that our citizens should early understand that the genuine source of correct republican principles is the bible, particularly the New Testament or the Christian religion.
Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer… in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.
I was sure I wanted to grow up to be either a veterinarian or a writer. In fact, I worked for a vet during high school, doing everything from cleaning cages to assisting in surgery.
Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.
I wouldn’t not want to be a director and write as I wouldn’t not to want to be a writer and direct movies.
If you want to be a writer, you have to learn to write in other people’s voices until you get the chance to write in your own.
I didn’t go out of my way to get into this movie stuff. I think of myself as a writer.
Whatever China I’d been born into, I would probably still have become a painter – I loved sketching portraits as a child, and began art classes at the age 7. But if China hadn’t been under Maoist rule, I might never have become a writer.
An incinerator is a writer’s best friend.
I think I began to like writing a lot more, and to be a better writer, when I did it for a while alone. It made me a little more confident about my style.
The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis.
If you’re a studio writer, the funny better be on the page.
I read that John Hughes script for ‘Mr. Mom,’ and I thought, ‘This guy is a funny writer.’ I went: ‘You ought to stick around and direct this thing.’ But he didn’t; he left, and look what he became. A really legendary comedy director.
There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other people. I’m talking about a writer’s critics, who don’t address what you’ve written, but want to probe into your existence and magnify the trivia of your life without any sense of humor, without any sense of context.
There is a force of exultation, a celebration of luck, when a writer finds himself a witness to the early morning of a culture that is defining itself, branch by branch, leaf by leaf, in that self-defining dawn, which is why, especially at the edge of the sea, it is good to make a ritual of the sunrise.
There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can’t think what to do with the long winter evenings.
Reading asks that you bring your whole life experience and your ability to decode the written word and your creative imagination to the page and be a co-author with the writer, because the story is just squiggles on the page unless you have a reader.
Whatever you want to do in the industry, do it on the smallest level at first. If you want to be a writer, write a screenplay in your house. If you want to be an actor, put on a one-man show. If you want to be a stand-up comedian, go to an open mic.
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
If you do enough planning before you start to write, there’s no way you can have writer’s block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.
I have never been in an ongoing series before and after series two I realized the writer has absolute control of your life.
I’m either going to be a writer or a bum.
Siren voices tell me, ‘You don’t have to keep going on.’ And then you think, ‘I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?’ I don’t know. I like being a writer.
I was training to be a lawyer… I was president of the law society at Glasgow University, and my bass guitarist was my secretary of my law society; the lead guitarist and writer worked at the law firm that I worked.
I am so excited to announce that I have written a book. I have actually written it myself with no ghost writer, just me! I never thought it would be possible but I have done it.
In the fashion world, you have to make clothes to sell. You have to make clothes for the press. You have to make clothes for yourself. What I mean is, everything is an obligation. But a writer? A pure artist? Maybe he doesn’t make one lira – but he does what he wants.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
I’m a writer. The more I act, the more resistance I have to it. If you accept work in a movie, you accept to be entrapped for a certain part of time, but you know you’re getting out. I’m also earning enough to keep my horses, buying some time to write.
Take any writer you want in the 19th century: they wrote with quill pens, dipping a piece of goose feather in ink and writing. And yet we read those novels today, and if we’re sensitive to them, we respond to them with an immediacy that is stronger than anything written today on a word processor.
In many a piece of music, it’s the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.
Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable.
For me as a writer, Albanian is simply an extraordinary means of expression – rich, malleable, adaptable. As I have said in my latest novel, ‘Spiritus,’ it has modalities that exist only in classical Greek, which puts one in touch with the mentality of antiquity.
The best thing about being a writer is it gives you readers who understand your deepest feelings and fears.
Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.
I am not a food critic. Or a chef. Or even a professional writer. What I am schooled in the art of, however, is enjoying myself.
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer’s role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
Everybody I know is a joke writer.
I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer.
You want to be a writer? Start writing. You want to be a filmmaker? Start shooting stuff on your phone right now.
Going off the road just leaves me more time to be a writer.
I told my parents when I was 12 I’d be a writer.
Music is where I have the most creative freedom, but I love producing. To me, that’s kind of where all the action is. You get a chance to have your hands in every aspect of a film. From picking a director, sometimes picking a writer, to the actors, the wardrobe, set design, editing, music, and marketing.
I’ve known since I was five that I wanted to be a writer.
I am a writer of fragments.
Faulkner is a writer who has had much to do with my soul, but Hemingway is the one who had the most to do with my craft – not simply for his books, but for his astounding knowledge of the aspect of craftsmanship in the science of writing.
College had little effect on me. I’d have been the same writer if I’d gone to MIT, except I’d have flunked out sooner.
When James Bond presses the watch and the car explodes, the writer doesn’t go into the science of it. One should leave it to the leap of faith. I have tried to explain as much as possible, and what I can’t, I have left it to people’s imagination.
Writing is a solitary occupation. Family, friends, and society are the natural enemies of the writer. He must be alone, uninterrupted, and slightly savage if he is to sustain and complete an undertaking.
Success comes to a writer as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.
I believe the wedding vows are sacred and precious, and it’s been one of my goals as a writer to portray the kind of marriages I’ve seen modeled in my family – my parents and grandparents, who all celebrated fifty-year anniversaries and well-beyond.
If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.
Justin Theroux is the ideal team partner to have. He’s a writer. He’s a director.
Two wrongs may not make a right, but a thousand wrongs make a writer.
I’m so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer.
As a writer and former elected official, I believe in the power of words.
I used to be a good story writer. I could make up a story with like, eight people in it and tell you where they all lived, what color their houses are.
Dictatorship and authentic literature are incompatible… The writer is the natural enemy of dictatorship.
I haven’t had trouble with writer’s block. I think it’s because my process involves writing very badly. My first drafts are filled with lurching, cliched writing, outright flailing around. Writing that doesn’t have a good voice or any voice. But then there will be good moments.
A lot of people get writer’s block, and I think you just have to show up for work, sit down, and be like, ‘I’m here.’ You have to stay confident and positive that you’re going to write something.
Studying psychology is fun because you’re always looking for the same things I think a writer should be looking for, which is the story behind the story.
I think the only boundaries are individual and personal. A writer should be free to write about anything he or she wants to, including the twin towers. I have made small references to 9/11 in my past two books.
A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
So many people romanticize writing. And I get it. But I never once wanted to be a writer.
I don’t believe in writer’s block. I’ll get stuck, but being stuck, I’ll still write a verse. If you know where you’re going, you can always start from there and work your way back.
A professional writer is an amateur who didn’t quit.
It’s a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.
There’s many things that I am. And all of those things come together at some point. If somebody wants to limit me, you know and they’ll say, ‘Well, this is Walter Mosley, the mystery writer.’ I don’t like that. Because I do many things.
A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.
I wanted to leave home, and I didn’t know where I was going or what I was going to do or what would happen. That’s youth, though. Being fixated on things. I was fixated on being a writer.
As a male writer, women are always what men pursue, and their world is always a mystery. So I always tried to present as many views as possible on women’s worlds.
I love historical fiction because there’s a literal truth, and there’s an emotional truth, and what the fiction writer tries to create is that emotional truth.
Some people are painters, and some are ballet dancers, and I’m a writer.
I think the best thing I ever did was, years before I got the ‘Late Night’ show, when I first got out to Los Angeles to be a television writer, the first thing I did was I signed up to take improvisational classes… And I studied that for years, and I really loved it.
You’re in the business – when you’re a writer, producer, director – to get ratings.
I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it’s about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader.
I used to want to be a writer or a painter, although I couldn’t paint very well.
I think, in some ways, there’s a point as a television writer that ‘executive producer’ is the natural credit you get, and it can be a vanity title, or you can make of it what you want.
I don’t consider myself a very good talker or writer but a pretty good filmmaker.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.
Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.
I am the worlds laziest writer.
The joy for me as a writer is that, despite the fact I spend most of my life on my own in a room eating too much chocolate and drinking too much tea, eventually they let me out into the world.
I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.
The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don’t, there’s no hope for you.
I had no idea that ‘Less Than Zero’ was going to be read by anyone outside of Los Angeles, and it’s – believe me, as the writer of the book I’m somewhat amused and intrigued by the idea that 25 years later it’s still out and people are still reading it.
At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family history, which I didn’t know anything about. I always felt hesitant in talking about Chinese culture and American culture.
I may not have become a good writer, but I managed to make a living out of writing.
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.
Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.
The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.
I think if I hadn’t become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened.
If I’d had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn’t so I slapped it up on the Web.
I think that readers believe that a writer becomes friends with the people he interviews and writes about – and I think there are some writers who do that – but that hasn’t happened to me. I do think it’s dangerous because then you write the article to please them, which is a terrible error.
A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of ‘border,’ and that is what I have experienced.
Plagiarism is one of the great academic sins. It has the power to destroy a scholar or writer and turn a lifetime’s work to dust.
If you know how to freestyle, you will never have writer’s block.
Volume depends precisely on the writer’s having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
When a writer talks about his work, he’s talking about a love affair.
The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
I was a government employee in the morning and a writer in the evening.
The catchword I use with my classes is: The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader.
One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
You have to be good. And keep getting better. For every writer taken on, another is dropped. A paradox: you have to rise to stay level.
Between the two dream coasts, we’re just called flyover country… If you aren’t known as an amorphous Eastern Seaboard writer, you’re dismissed as a regional author.
It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.
I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.
I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.
A writer’s main tool is his memory – his own memory, the collective memory of his people. And the strongest memory is the one that is created by a wound to the heart.
Social media is a giant distraction to the ultimate aim, which is honing your craft as a songwriter. There are people who are exceptional at it, however, and if you can do both things, then that’s fantastic, but if you are a writer, the time is better spent on a clever lyric than a clever tweet.
Screenplays I didn’t really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.
It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator’s skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.
My being a writer and playing Scrabble are connected. If I have a good writing day, I’ll take a break and play online Scrabble. My favorite word as a child was ‘carrion,’ before I knew what it meant. I later created crossword puzzles, which was a lot about puns, and how words would create these strange, strange things.
By the time I would have graduated, at 22, I was a writer and featured performer on Saturday Night Live.
I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
The truth is that every writer, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that’s what I think I’m doing.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.
As a writer, you have control of the words you put on the page. But once that manuscript leaves your hand, you give control to the reader. As a director, you are limited by everything: weather, budget, and egos.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.
For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life.
I’m not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.
An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.
I am trying to concentrate on books. You know, I love Dostoevsky; he’s my favourite writer.
I wrote every day. I don’t think I could have written ‘Just Kids’ had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.
A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.
My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.
I have a crazy background in music, both as a performer and writer.
There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.
I don’t practice, but I am still officially in paediatrics. I keep in touch with journals, and I have a very good data bank of medical information and there is a key thing for a writer knowing where to go. I know where to go to get the information that I need.
I’m a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.
That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don’t have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.
I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.
There are Behan experts in international universities, but we seem to have forgotten him here in Ireland. He was an extraordinarily gifted writer. His poetry alone is outstanding.
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer… a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.
With a book I am the writer and I am also the director and I’m all of the actors and I’m the special effects guy and the lighting technician: I’m all of that. So if it’s good or bad, it’s all up to me.
If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.
I knew I wasn’t a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn’t want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.
I’m not a writer who looks for the fantastic and the sensational. I like the world we’ve got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.
When you’re a writer, if you’re very lucky, you create these characters that you fall in love with, and you feel like they’re guiding you rather than you guiding them.
I really enjoy the writing process because I can do it from my house. I can create these characters and take them in the different directions that I want to take them. You have a lot of freedom as a writer.
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
I don’t think it’s the writer’s job to give answers or to give opinions. In fact, when a writer has answers, I think the work ends up being corrupted. It becomes didactic. What a book does is share a consciousness and invite people to explore the questions as best as you can.
If I hadn’t spent many years trying to be as compassionate as Mother Teresa, as positive a thinker as W. Clement Stone, as prolific a writer as Stephen King, and as good a speaker as many of the legends I have studied, I would not be as successful as I am today.
I’m more of a writer than an actor, and I used to say that I’m mostly an improviser, though I haven’t improvised in awhile.
Because I was a television writer for many years, I write very conversationally. I put things straight, and with a lot of humor.
Whether you believe it or not, you have to understand the politics. In every script, there is a political bend that the writer has included. Whether you like it or not, is on you. But it’s very important to know that politics.
Using pseudonyms was such a part of the early feminist movement. We didn’t want to have this star system. We wanted attention on the ideas, not the persona of the writer.
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.
Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that’s too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.
I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.
I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.
The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.
It’s a challenge for any writer to write beyond what he knows. You get material, adapt it, and do the best you can with it.
I don’t have writer’s block, really. I do have times when I can’t get the lead, and that is the only part of the story which I have serious trouble with. I don’t write a word of the article until I have the lead. It just sets the whole tone – the whole point of view.
On the ‘Star,’ you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.
All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what’s cool.
In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day’s work for a writer. You can’t put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
I do like to work on a Marvel method, so if I’ve got the opportunity, and the writer is happy to do it, I like to have a writer detail what happens on a page, but not saying what happens in every scene.
I am hoping that I can be known as a great writer and actor some day, rather than a sex symbol.
Because I’m such a creative person, and I’ve always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I’d be doing the things I’m doing today.
I have no conceit as a writer; in fact, I find it very difficult to start writing about sculpture generally & my aims in particular.
I only sound intelligent when there’s a good script writer around.
Every time I’ve had to do journalistic investigations, I’ve cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It’s the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.
The waste basket is the writer’s best friend.
If I weren’t a writer, I think I might have thrown myself more enthusiastically into advertising. But, it’s difficult to imagine being a diligent copywriter. It would be quite exasperating for me.
The writer who can’t do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won’t dream of sharing his royalties with that editor.
I do really enjoy Jay McInerney’s wine writing. He’s a good writer. He brings his fiction-writing skillset. He’s not afraid to put wine in kind of a racy context and speak very candidly about it.
I consider myself a writer, foremost – a nonfiction writer.
Your worst enemy as a writer – especially one working online a lot of the time – is obscurity.
I love New York, and I’m drawn to a certain intensity of life, but I’ve just never felt like I want to escape from the Midwest. A writer lives a great deal in his own head, and so one intuitively finds places where your head is more clear. New York for me is one of those places.
Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
I am neither a writer nor a theorist. For a person who creates things to utter too many words means to regulate himself – a frightening prospect.
I think self-doubt, as grim as it can be, makes me a better writer. Stasis and hubris would probably be the death knell for my career.
There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
One of my favorites is ‘Parks and Recreation.’ Great show; awesome writing; beautiful, diverse cast. They also have a very diverse writer’s room, which I love.
I think social media is… really cool in the sense that I don’t think that a writer like me would’ve found a readership if maybe Instagram wasn’t there.
My dad is a great writer. Naturally talented, naturally charming. He embodies that back-in-the-day cool.
The writer’s duty is to keep on writing.
If I’ve done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
You’re meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there’s a lot to be said for a very happy one that just lets you get on with it.
I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.
The mystery form was very helpful for me as a beginning writer because mystery novels and suspense novels have a beginning, a middle and an end.
I like being a writer.
It’s important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he’s writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.
If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.
The writer I feel the most affinity with – you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they’re 18th century novels – is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he’s the guy who does it for me.
Having a writer in the family is a curse – for the family. I do feel more or less guilty when I’m writing.
If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I’d say the question ‘How then must we live?’ is at the heart of it, for me.
My aunt got me interested in journalism – she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, ‘Play like you’re a writer.’
You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
I’m not a writer on a mission, and I’m very suspicious of writers on missions, but I’m also not living a false life.
I was a writer before ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ and I’ll be a writer after it’s over. It’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
In my next incarnation, I want to be a writer.
You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.
You don’t know what you need when you’re a young writer. You can get small slivers of critical input, advice, comments, but if you’re deep in the perplexity of your own process, as you should be, sorting it out in your own way, nothing is going to guide you more than small gestures of encouragement.
I still always think the greatest moment for me, as a writer, is when I press that button and send the first draft of the script.
I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
To do justice to a lifelong dream of being a writer, I must give it the intense concentration and focus I gave to track. To do both with excellence is not possible. It is with a sense of sadness and joyous anticipation that I leave track and move on.
Writing is a very strenuous thing – it’s like banging your head against a wall. At the end of the day, acting is better, just because nobody ever asked me if I wanted a Pellegrino in the writer’s room.
Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
If you only hear one side of the story, at some point, you have to question who the writer is.
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.
One likes to think one grows as a writer as one ages, else all you get is an ‘old’ young writer. Beyond that is the changing landscape of the universe and the stories I choose to tell.
I became a script writer with absolutely no idea of how to write a script whatsoever. I still feel a bit of an outsider in that regard. If I can maintain that approach to screenwriting, it can continue to be enjoyable.
Capra always wanted a screenwriter with him, even on the soundstage. The writer had to be there at his side.
For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they’ll do in any scene you put them in.
David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He’s not only a great director, but he’s also a great writer.
A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
Having been an actor and a writer for so long – 20 years or so – I felt that it would be daft to go to one’s grave without having directed. It’s a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.
The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.
When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business.
Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
I wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.
I know who I am and what I’m doing in my life and what I’ve accomplished and continue to accomplish as a performer, as a writer, as an artist, as a person, as a human being.
It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
You know you lose a lot of social skills if you’re a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that.
If you’re a writer, you just keep following the path – keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.
You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual. Most of them are mangled and even have made up stuff in them, that is to say, made up stuff by the writer or editor.
But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.
I think that if a writer doesn’t use her voice, be it in her writing or online or in real life, then what is the point of having one?
We love to start from a real place, whether it’s us or our friends or working on a story from a writer’s friend.
I don’t know if I am a good, average, or bad writer, but I write fast. Everything I observe, my experiences and imagination come together while writing.
As a food writer, it’s my job to know each and every cuisine on this planet as well as I can.
If you wish to be a writer, write.
I know a lot of crime writers feel very underrated, like they’re not taken seriously, and they want to be just thought of as writers rather than ghettoised as crime writers, but I love being thought of firmly as a crime writer.
In a weird way, I never wanted – I don’t consider myself a very good writer. I consider myself okay; I don’t consider myself great. There’s Woody Allen and Aaron Sorkin. There’s Quentin Tarantino. I’m not ever gonna be on that level. But I do consider myself a good filmmaker.
In general, a writer would like to think that the best book that he has written is the book that he is writing, and the next book will be even better. Maybe if this is not true, it is very useful to keep the illusion alive.
I did several interesting jobs, working in restaurants, I worked at a lab rat farm, feeding and watering all these rats. Then I got a full-time job as a technical writer for a large scientific research laboratory.
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
A writer’s ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years’ time and for one reader in a hundred years’ time.
I felt a failure because I couldn’t sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn’t hire me as a real writer.
Fast food is hugely important in the life of a comedy writer. All we do is order in, and what we’re going to eat is hotly debated.
A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.
From the moment I wrote ‘Leaf Storm’ I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.
My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called ‘The Southern Planter.’ He didn’t think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I’d seen him working at his desk. I just assumed that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer.
Before we started shooting ‘Homecoming,’ we were in the writer’s room for ‘Mr. Robot.’ I was also editing Season 3 of ‘Mr. Robot’ while I was prepping for the ‘Homecoming’ shoot. So yeah, it’s a lot of hats.
There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot.
The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn’t have a personal point of view, it’s impossible to be a creator.
I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.
For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.
It is my desire to be a great writer. I know that I still have a mountain to climb to achieve that.
I had liver disease. I’m completely cured now, but I thought about if I died from liver cancer, what my life would look like. I followed this wish of being a fiction writer.
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
The good thing about not speaking the language is you just listen. You listen to everyone, every producer, every writer.
I think the most dangerous influence for a young writer is to be treated with cynicism or discouragement.
The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.
It’s always easiest for me as a writer if I know I have a great ending. It can make everything else work. If you don’t have a good ending, it’s the hardest things in the world to come up with one. I always loved the ending of ‘The Kite Runner,’ and the scenes that are most faithful to the book are the last few scenes.
We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent. But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers’ work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver.
I’ve never thought of myself as a writer. I still don’t, despite all the writing I’ve done.
When you’re a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.
There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.
The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.
Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.
People are always saying that I must have been the class clown, with all these voices. No, I was way too shy to be the class clown; I was a class clown’s writer.
I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way – one solid scene doesn’t have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.
You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.
A writer is like a bean plant – he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
‘Top Boy,’ for some people, was very controversial because it seemed to be portraying black people in a certain light that they thought to be stereotypical. However, what I would say is that the writer went and lived in Hackney in East London for a long time and did his research really well.
I figure anytime you put an adjective before ‘writer,’ it’s a way of dismissing the writer.
The process hasn’t changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.
Books are something social – a writer speaking to a reader – so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
Writing is very much an emotional process; it requires you to be very in touch with your feelings. That is the opposite of what you’re taught as a medical doctor. We’re supposed to be detached and logical. Maybe because I started off as a writer and then became a doctor, I’m able to integrate those two.
It’s a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
To answer that I have to describe what I think is my responsibility as a thriller writer: To give my readers the most exciting roller coaster ride of a suspense story I can possibly think of.
No writer of a portion of the Bible was perfect. It was the direct and miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit that what they wrote is without mistake.
I’ve had aunts and uncles who not only haven’t read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.
A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it.
I’m my own boss, my own editor, my own shooter, my own writer, everything. This is all stuff I learned through trial and error… failing at a lot of things has taught me how to succeed at them eventually… you roll with the punches.
I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being a writer without a blink.
I’m not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that’s more what entertainment and music should be.
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
I’m not a writer because I want to make money. I’m a writer because I’m a very slow thinker, but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with any kind of finesse is by telling stories.
Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
Ultimately I’m the writer for me, but also, anytime one of my friends gets stuck with a bit, they can call me, and I’m pretty good at helping them get there.
Paul’s the writer. Yeah, I wrote a little of that stuff, but that’s just technically true. In spirit, and in essence of the truth, it doesn’t matter. So I don’t know, maybe I’m being foolish for not being technical. Yeah, I wrote a certain portion of the things.
When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.
As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that… That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.
I’m an escapist kind of writer.
It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one’s own creativity – that’s a much tougher matter.
Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.
The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart.
I’m fairly competant as a director and actor, but I am Mr. Neurotic as a writer. I just don’t have enough confidence in my abilities to take criticism well. I take it personally. Start with ‘It’s a masterpiece,’ and then tell me what you think could be changed.
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.
One of the things I love, and I’m a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.
Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang; they repeat it, and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that’s thrilling. That’s when my pen flies.
I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.
As a musician and a guitar player, I can noodle as well as anybody. But from my background as a session musician, I always try to play what is called for by the lyric and listening to the song. As a writer, that’s what I do, too.
History is imperfect and biased, and it always, always has omissions. The most common omissions are the bits that the writer of that history took for granted that his readers would know.
For the vast majority of my adult life, I was a freelance writer, forever scrambling for work that paid an insulting non-amount.
Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don’t want to go to PTA meetings.
Why do I write? I have been called a writer of catastrophes, but that isn’t true. I am always looking for words of love. Hate will not save us. Only love.
Margot Livesey, my dear friend, reads all the drafts of what I write, and I read hers. We have an intense working relationship. I’ve been really lucky to know her. She’s a great reader and teacher as well as an astonishingly good writer.
Sometimes, what’s not said is just as important to the writing as what is said. As a writer, we have our voices heard. I think that, at oftentimes, the ability to allow the dialogue to recede properly into the world of the film is also a really valid sort of way to be a writer, I think.
I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn’t something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.
One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a ‘binge’ writer – like a binge drinker. I go on binges.
To become a novelist, the most crucial thing one must do is read, read and read again – gradually you begin to think like a writer. Ideas are not found – they are shaped.
I made a conscious decision that I was not going to have children. I didn’t want others raising them, and looking after them myself would get in the way of being a musician and writer.
I have been called ‘The American De Maupassant.’ Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don’t like to be compared to a filthy writer.
I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift… you don’t have to look too far in history to see that’s just not the case.
As a guest who doesn’t eat, drink or smoke, you leave much to be desired, but as a writer, you’re my girl.
You know, that’s kind of the thing, I can’t freestyle and I used to always wonder why I couldn’t, and when I would try once out of every six months, but I was always a great writer!
As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.
I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone’s scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that’s how I write.
The highest compliment one can give a writer is not to say that one wholeheartedly agrees with his observations, but that he provoked – really, forced – difficult thinking about consequential matters and internal questioning of one’s own assumptions, often without quick or clear resolution.
Hemingway was a jerk. I mean he was really a great jerk. He was a good writer, and he did all sorts of things that I would never have the courage to do, but I don’t think I’d enjoy being in the same room with him. He’s not my kind of person.
My point of view as a writer has to be a lot more ego-less than just like being some performer on stage with a hairdo.
I suppose my Iranian identity is one of the driving forces for being a writer: I want to set the record straight about who I really am.
I didn’t become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don’t just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.
In Britain, we need to start presenting the option of being a writer in front of black women. We need to present the idea of being a writer into poorer communities because the majority of black people in this country are working class. We need to let working-class people know that their voices are important.
When you’re writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children’s books.
The more you live, the better writer you are.
I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.
To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.
A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.
I realize that I am typically vulnerable only when and where and how much it suits me. I can choose my writer words and even go back and edit.
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
I’ve found I can plunge the characters into whatever absurd, awful situation, and readers will follow as long as the writer makes them seem like ‘real people.’
I still can’t quite believe it. Although there was something about the fact that it was a first-time writer, a first-time producer, and a first-time director all at the same time.
Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.
It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the ‘fronts’ people assume before one another’s eyes, and the ‘front’ a writer puts on the face of reality.
I have a writer’s memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
I think that, as a writer, while it’s your job to construct stories, you have to navigate your way through them with your heart.
Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.
Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn’t a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.
At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.
As the writer, you’re always a presence in the song. If you get close to what human beings are like, you’re writing about common experience. We all do much the same things, so if you nail somebody, then you’ve also nailed yourself.
As a writer, you’re not even at the party when you work in film. At best, you’re the one laying out the canapes.
I’m not really a mass market writer.
I wrote my first book at 20, but my whole focus from about the age of 12 was to be a writer.
I really believe that a writer is someone who has trained their mind to misbehave.
You know, I look to myself mainly as a creative writer all my life and a medical doctor.
This sort of encouragement is vital for any writer. And lastly the publication of Touching the Flame, which was on hold for two years and went through a few publishers before finding a stable home.
So must the writer, whose productions should Take with the vulgar, be of vulgar mould.
The writer’s language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
I used to want to be a children’s writer, because I would have all these great ideas when I was little, and I’d write them and draw them, and turn them into class.
When you start out as a TV writer, you get a lot of pressure from outside forces to fit into what they think people want.
I don’t want to make a comfortable film. I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in answering people’s questions; I’m interested in posing questions. I’m interested in sparking a conversation between two people about what something means. That’s enough for me, as a writer and as a director.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Fidel Castro’s most scandalous show trial was not mounted against a political figure but against a writer: Heberto Padilla. In 1971, after 38 days of detention, Mr. Padilla was forced to ‘confess’ at the Cuban writers’ union to the charges of ‘subversive activities.’
It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
My goal as a writer is more to comfort than to disturb.
That’s my contribution – running a sound, healthy company that serves millions of customers well and employs hundreds of thousands of people. What else am I going to do? I’m not an artist. I’m not a writer. I’m not a musician. I’d love to be a tennis player or musician. I’m not.
There’s a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer’s head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it’s going to.
Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It’s the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It’s that important, so don’t mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.
The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the ‘personality-cult’ of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself.
A writer must experiment with genres. Otherwise, it is a restriction on the craft.
It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you’ve written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer’s memory that filters experience, but the reader’s as well.
I wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl – long before I was a musician and a songwriter.
My ambition, a long time ago, was to be a film music writer. A compromise then was to be the guy who wrote songs for a band and played slide guitar. Then the singer didn’t turn up for an audition, and I was the only one who knew the words. That was it – bingo! Life took a different course.
The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn’t find a place for myself, for years and years.
The Onion Field made a real writer. And then I knew it was over, I couldn’t be a cop anymore.
First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work.
The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.
I’m not a good crime writer. I’m not good with plots… so I have to do something else.
Ignorance is bliss as a writer, I think.
There’s no such thing as a writer’s block. If you’re having trouble writing, well, pick up the pen and write. No matter what, keep that hand moving. Writing is really a physical activity.
Those golden minutes before you are completely awake, when your mind is just drifting, you have no censorship; you are ready to develop any kind of idea. That’s when I come up with the best and worst ideas. That is the privilege of being a writer – that you can stay in bed for an hour in the morning and it’s work time.
It’s very hard to be a gentleman and a writer.
I’m definitely a writer. I don’t even know how to freestyle.
A writer without a pen would be like a duck without water!
Yes, but another writer I read in high school who just knocked me out was Theodore Dreiser. I read An American Tragedy all in one weekend and couldn’t put it down – I locked myself in my room. Now that was antithetical to every other book I was reading at the time because Dreiser really had no style, but it was powerful.
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
I am writing things on my own, but I really believe co-writing makes you a better writer.
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
There was a writer in the ’20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn’t tell you what it was.
It’s really important to me to keep growing as a writer, to look for new challenges and be harshly critical of my own work in order to learn and tell better stories.
That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world.
If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water.
To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company.
I wear a lot of different hats – from writer to producer and artist. We all do 5 or 6 jobs, everything from creating our own graphic design to actually recording and the whole bit.
The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.
I think TV is much more the writer’s medium and film is about the director and their vision and how you can collaborate with them and see that through to the end. They are so different.
Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter.
Never, ever become a writer. It’s a nightmare.
I’m not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.
A novel’s whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
The writer catches the changes of his mind on the hop. Growth is exciting; growth is dynamic and alarming. Growth of the soul, growth of the mind.
Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is that scribbling child in a grown-up body wondering if anybody is listening.
Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.
Really, anyone in the business who transitions into directing as a writer or editor or an actor or a cinematographer, at some point you have to kind of take a leap and say, ‘I’m committed to this.’
I started out as a writer and a director. I started acting because I wanted to know how to relate to the actors. When people ask me what I do, I don’t really say that I’m an actor, because actors often wait for someone to give them roles.
It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.
‘The Ballad of Black Tom’ was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft’s legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me.
I always wanted to be some kind of writer or newspaper reporter. But after college… I did other things.
The greatest part of a writer’s time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.
Many people worked hard in order to create ‘Crash Landing on You.’ I am grateful to the writer, the directors, and all the production staff.
I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.
I have an editor in my head, that’s why I can’t read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer.
I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer’s block, the feeling of not being able to do these things.
The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.
I don’t think that women necessarily always write like women. I was a writer on the ‘Comedy Central Roasts’ for a while, and I always wrote the jokes that people assumed the men would write.
Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?
The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others.
I did The ‘Acid Test’ at the Royal Court, by Anya Reiss, who’s the most wonderful, amazing female writer. She was only 19 when she wrote it. She wrote it about three girls in a flat on a Friday night, and that was magic because it was so rare to have three girls in your age group in a play. It just doesn’t happen.
As a writer, that moment every few years when I buy a new laptop and find out that all the word processing stuff has slightly changed again (stuff I spend every working day using) is like getting into bed at night and finding some mad robot where you expected your wife to be.
‘Made it as a writer’? I’m still wondering if I’ve made it as a writer. I’ve made it as a published writer of the type of SF that I want to write and read, but I’m still waiting for that big breakthrough.
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.
Men whose sense of taste is destroyed by sickness, sometimes think honey sour. A diseased eye does not see many things which do exist, and notes many things which do not exist. The same thing frequently takes place with regard to the force of words, when the critic is inferior to the writer.
You have a strange relationship with calamity when you’re a writer: you write about it; as an artist, you objectify and fetishize it. You render life into material, and that’s a creepy thing to do.
I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.
I wanted to become a writer. I enjoyed reading as a child.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane.
A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood.
Writer’s block! It doesn’t exist. You just long for ideas to go away so you have an idea of peace.
Depending on what I’m working on, I come to the writing desk with entirely different mindsets. When I change form one to the other, it’s as if another writer is on the scene.
The imprisoning of a writer is the same as the burning of a book.
When you’re a writer, your song has to resonate with the person you’re writing for in order for them to want to sing it. But if you’re an artist, you can sing whatever you want.
When you’re starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that’s gone before and the stuff that’s influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that’s where you start from.
I’m not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don’t. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I’m concerned with.
I thought I’d definitely be a writer, whatever I did.
I’m glad a genre writer has got a knighthood, but stunned that it was me.
The painter, sculptor, writer, and musician are protected by law. So are inventors. But the chef has absolutely no redress for plagiarism on his work; on the contrary, the more the latter is liked and appreciated, the more will people clamour for his recipes.
Chelsea Handler is a good friend of mine, and I always was inspired by the fact that she was taking her life and turning it into these ridiculous, raunchy memoirs. She really has a talent, and she’s a great writer. I was inspired by her trajectory.
If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That’s enough.
I lead a very conventional life. I don’t lead a writer’s life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people. This was more true when I was living in California, when I didn’t lead a writer’s life at all.
I live on the margin of just about everything. I’m a marginal person, and I think that is where I’ve become comfortable. I’m marginally there in my native life. I can do as much as I can, but I’m always German, too, you know, and I’m always a mother. That’s my first identity, but I’m always a writer, too.
The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.
Writing changed my life. It has an existential dimension, and that’s the same for every writer. Every artist has a moment of awakening, of happening upon an idea that grabs hold of you, regardless of whether you are a painter or a writer.
One of the odd things about being a writer is that you never reach a point of certainty, a point of mastery where you can say, ‘Right. Now I understand how this is done.’
Life can’t defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer’s lover until death.
It’s funny, in a way the actor is a writer. It’s not like the two things are so separate as to be like apples and oranges. The writer and the actor are one.
It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane.
I think I have grown impatient with just being a writer.
Convincing Robert Englund to come out of retirement to play Freddy Krueger one last time is a true bucket-list moment for me as a writer. I’ve been a longtime obsessive fan, collecting Freddy artwork and action figures.
My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.
In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.
Productivity is a relative matter. And it’s really insignificant: What is ultimately important is a writer’s strongest books.
You have to believe in yourself and only trust your own vision and instincts. If I’d listened to what other people thought about my work in the first 10 years that I was a writer, I never would have made it to begin with.
Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example, writers of slave narratives tend to lose their individual voices, as they were expected to stand in for all other voices, which were absent.
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn’t require any.
The writer crafts their ideal world. In my world, everyone has really long conversations or just picks apart pop culture to death and everyone talks in monologue.
Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?
When ‘If God Was a Banker’ became a success, it changed my entire perspective. I wanted to write more and wanted to be lot more successful as a writer.
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten.
I loved movies, but I can’t remember ever really wanting to be an actress, and I certainly didn’t imagine ever being in a movie. I think I wanted to be a writer.
Connie Heermann is a Freedom Writer teacher. I believe she represents the best of what dedicated teachers can be because she chose to serve her students, not her school board.
I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don’t get any patients.
I just have a thing for writers. Maybe it because I’m just so not a writer.
What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer’s life with the writing. I think that’s something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.
The storyline of a fantasy novel is filled with such a sense of enchantment, beauty and strangeness; it allows the writer to explore the big ontological questions of life that would sound like a sermon in a social realist novel.
I’m a theological writer mistaken for a political writer. My theme is grace versus karma.
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
Now I would say I’m absolutely a feminist writer.
As I read more and more – and it was not all verse, by any means – my love for the real life of words increased until I knew that I must live with them and in them, always. I knew, in fact, that I must be a writer of words, and nothing else.
What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer.
I started out with three creative jobs – painter, janitor and gag writer.
I think good art should always be entertaining, or at least give pleasure of some sort. And my chief goal as a writer has always been to tell a good story and give my readers a good time.
I was never a quick writer, but composed with great care and efforts.
If you are going to be a writer, you have to have self-belief, every writer gets rejections, they say the difference between a successful and unsuccessful writer is an unsuccessful writer gives up, if you keep going you will succeed.
This was something that was obsessing me and creating a writer’s block. To get involved and get stuck in, get the proper information about what’s going on has really helped.
The first time I went to Helene Hanff’s apartment at 305 East 72nd Street, it was 1977, and I was a 16-year-old girl who wanted to be a writer.
The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
I’m the luckiest writer on earth.
Because I’ve spent most of my life with such a beautiful, talented, challenging female, I feel I’ve gained – and am still gaining – a great deal of knowledge about the feminine mystique and about personal relationships – knowledge which is so important to a writer.
I have a cheat-sheet for each one of my characters about their personality, the way they look, etc. So there is no possible way that I could have writer’s block.
Being an outsider makes you a really good writer.
A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.
Whenever I work with different artists, I expand as a song writer, as a producer, and I always want to try and find the bridge between my world and their world.
Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent… Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.
Lest it sound as if I resent my day job, I have to say that my day job is the reason I write, and it has been the best thing for me as a writer.
In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.
I like L.A. It’s like a mini break. For a writer, it’s hilarious. Like the food. Where I come from, we eat chip sandwiches: white bread, butter, tomato catsup and big fat french fries. It’s delicious. Here, you order a creme caramel and the waiter says, ‘You know, that contains dairy.’
I think a man turns into a writer by editing his own texts.
Every reader finds himself. The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.
For 35 years, I was a writer. I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren’t funny. Some of them weren’t appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that.
One of the hardest things about writing lyrics is to make the lyrics sit on the music in such a way that you’re not aware there was a writer there.
I’m a writer, so I like nuances.
I’m open to reading almost anything – fiction, nonfiction – as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.
The fact remains that I am a very artless and incompetent writer.
I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
I’ve learned to accept that I’m a children’s writer, even if it’s not what I set out to become. It’s what I should have been all along, and I’ll stay in this role as long as I’m a writer.
When I got recognized as a writer, when I got the Emmy, I was more excited than the Emmys I had gotten as an actor.
I’m a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it’s dangerous if I’m seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.
I think a lot of writers spend years just getting up the courage to write because it seems like such a fantasy of a profession. My dad saved me all that time by making me think, ‘Oh, anyone can be a writer. It’s like being a firefighter or a lawyer.’
I don’t mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn’t a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated.
I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
My identity is based around being a writer. I can’t not write. It’s a compulsion.
When you translate poetry in particular, you’re obliged to look at how the writer with whom you’re working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
Reading a newspaper is like reading someone’s letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
I’d like to take a course in writing. I’m not the best writer in the world. I’d like to write more neatly, even though people don’t send many handwritten letters these days.
Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death.
Ultimately, I don’t think you can be a character who’s completely alien or divorced from your own personality. It’s probably true of every writer – it’s probably true of every filmmaker, every songwriter – that, ultimately, every character you create is a facet of yourself.
My mom worked as a pharmacist, but she is one of the best storytellers I know. My sister is a gospel and opera singer and my brother, who passed away, was a writer.
