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.
