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.
