You’re in the business – when you’re a writer, producer, director – to get ratings.
I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it’s about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader.
I used to want to be a writer or a painter, although I couldn’t paint very well.
I think, in some ways, there’s a point as a television writer that ‘executive producer’ is the natural credit you get, and it can be a vanity title, or you can make of it what you want.
I don’t consider myself a very good talker or writer but a pretty good filmmaker.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.
Generally, a writer of force is anywhere from 20 years to 200 years ahead of his generation.
I am the worlds laziest writer.
The joy for me as a writer is that, despite the fact I spend most of my life on my own in a room eating too much chocolate and drinking too much tea, eventually they let me out into the world.
I brought all the instincts of a writer with me into the monastery.
The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don’t, there’s no hope for you.
I had no idea that ‘Less Than Zero’ was going to be read by anyone outside of Los Angeles, and it’s – believe me, as the writer of the book I’m somewhat amused and intrigued by the idea that 25 years later it’s still out and people are still reading it.
At the beginning of my career as a writer, I felt I knew nothing of Chinese culture. I was writing about emotional confusion with my mother related to our different beliefs. Hers was based in family history, which I didn’t know anything about. I always felt hesitant in talking about Chinese culture and American culture.
I may not have become a good writer, but I managed to make a living out of writing.
Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience, of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer’s own life.
Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.
The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.
I think if I hadn’t become a writer I would just have suppressed that part of my personality. I think I would have put it in a box that I never opened.
If I’d had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn’t so I slapped it up on the Web.
I think that readers believe that a writer becomes friends with the people he interviews and writes about – and I think there are some writers who do that – but that hasn’t happened to me. I do think it’s dangerous because then you write the article to please them, which is a terrible error.
A writer has a difficult fate, but a Jewish writer has an especially difficult fate. His soul is torn; he lives on two streets with three languages. It is a misfortune to live on this sort of ‘border,’ and that is what I have experienced.
Plagiarism is one of the great academic sins. It has the power to destroy a scholar or writer and turn a lifetime’s work to dust.
If you know how to freestyle, you will never have writer’s block.
Volume depends precisely on the writer’s having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
When a writer talks about his work, he’s talking about a love affair.
The writer’s joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought.
I was a government employee in the morning and a writer in the evening.
The catchword I use with my classes is: The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader.
One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.
The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.
You have to be good. And keep getting better. For every writer taken on, another is dropped. A paradox: you have to rise to stay level.
Between the two dream coasts, we’re just called flyover country… If you aren’t known as an amorphous Eastern Seaboard writer, you’re dismissed as a regional author.
It is not important for me as a writer that you leave a piece of writing of mine with either an agreement or even a resonance with what I have said. What is important is that you leave with the resonance of what you have felt and what you thought in reaction to that.
I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.
I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.
A writer’s main tool is his memory – his own memory, the collective memory of his people. And the strongest memory is the one that is created by a wound to the heart.
Social media is a giant distraction to the ultimate aim, which is honing your craft as a songwriter. There are people who are exceptional at it, however, and if you can do both things, then that’s fantastic, but if you are a writer, the time is better spent on a clever lyric than a clever tweet.
Screenplays I didn’t really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.
It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator’s skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen.
My being a writer and playing Scrabble are connected. If I have a good writing day, I’ll take a break and play online Scrabble. My favorite word as a child was ‘carrion,’ before I knew what it meant. I later created crossword puzzles, which was a lot about puns, and how words would create these strange, strange things.
By the time I would have graduated, at 22, I was a writer and featured performer on Saturday Night Live.
I am a writer who came of a sheltered life. A sheltered life can be a daring life as well. For all serious daring starts from within.
The truth is that every writer, whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that’s what I think I’m doing.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.
As a writer, you have control of the words you put on the page. But once that manuscript leaves your hand, you give control to the reader. As a director, you are limited by everything: weather, budget, and egos.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.
The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible.
For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life.
I’m not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.
An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.
I am trying to concentrate on books. You know, I love Dostoevsky; he’s my favourite writer.
I wrote every day. I don’t think I could have written ‘Just Kids’ had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.
A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.
My history is pretty different from the history of most professors. I was a high school dropout. I dropped out and became a science fiction writer.
I have a crazy background in music, both as a performer and writer.
There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.
I don’t practice, but I am still officially in paediatrics. I keep in touch with journals, and I have a very good data bank of medical information and there is a key thing for a writer knowing where to go. I know where to go to get the information that I need.
I’m a good scholar when it comes to reading but a blotting kind of writer when you give me a pen.
That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don’t have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.
I can only assume that your editorial writer tripped over the First Amendment and thought it was the office cat.
There are Behan experts in international universities, but we seem to have forgotten him here in Ireland. He was an extraordinarily gifted writer. His poetry alone is outstanding.
Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.
I read Freud because I find him an excellent writer… a writer of police thrillers that can be followed with great passion.
