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.
