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.
