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.
