With a book I am the writer and I am also the director and I’m all of the actors and I’m the special effects guy and the lighting technician: I’m all of that. So if it’s good or bad, it’s all up to me.
If you want to tell stories, be a writer, not a filmmaker.
I knew I wasn’t a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn’t want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.
I’m not a writer who looks for the fantastic and the sensational. I like the world we’ve got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
Long before the idea of a writer’s conference was a glimmer in anyone’s eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style by absorbing the lucid sentences of Montaigne and Samuel Johnson.
When you’re a writer, if you’re very lucky, you create these characters that you fall in love with, and you feel like they’re guiding you rather than you guiding them.
I really enjoy the writing process because I can do it from my house. I can create these characters and take them in the different directions that I want to take them. You have a lot of freedom as a writer.
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
I don’t think it’s the writer’s job to give answers or to give opinions. In fact, when a writer has answers, I think the work ends up being corrupted. It becomes didactic. What a book does is share a consciousness and invite people to explore the questions as best as you can.
If I hadn’t spent many years trying to be as compassionate as Mother Teresa, as positive a thinker as W. Clement Stone, as prolific a writer as Stephen King, and as good a speaker as many of the legends I have studied, I would not be as successful as I am today.
I’m more of a writer than an actor, and I used to say that I’m mostly an improviser, though I haven’t improvised in awhile.
Because I was a television writer for many years, I write very conversationally. I put things straight, and with a lot of humor.
Whether you believe it or not, you have to understand the politics. In every script, there is a political bend that the writer has included. Whether you like it or not, is on you. But it’s very important to know that politics.
Using pseudonyms was such a part of the early feminist movement. We didn’t want to have this star system. We wanted attention on the ideas, not the persona of the writer.
It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have.
The writer isn’t made in a vacuum. Writers are witnesses. The reason we need writers is because we need witnesses to this terrifying century.
Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.
Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that’s too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.
I wasn’t that great a chef, and I don’t think I’m that great a writer.
I was brought up to try to see what was wrong and right it. Since I am a writer, writing is how I right it.
The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.
It’s a challenge for any writer to write beyond what he knows. You get material, adapt it, and do the best you can with it.
I don’t have writer’s block, really. I do have times when I can’t get the lead, and that is the only part of the story which I have serious trouble with. I don’t write a word of the article until I have the lead. It just sets the whole tone – the whole point of view.
On the ‘Star,’ you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.
All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what’s cool.
In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day’s work for a writer. You can’t put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.
I do like to work on a Marvel method, so if I’ve got the opportunity, and the writer is happy to do it, I like to have a writer detail what happens on a page, but not saying what happens in every scene.
I am hoping that I can be known as a great writer and actor some day, rather than a sex symbol.
Because I’m such a creative person, and I’ve always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I’d be doing the things I’m doing today.
I have no conceit as a writer; in fact, I find it very difficult to start writing about sculpture generally & my aims in particular.
I only sound intelligent when there’s a good script writer around.
Every time I’ve had to do journalistic investigations, I’ve cursed, but later I discovered that it had helped me enormously with writing fiction. It’s the one thing that can save me from becoming an academic writer.
The waste basket is the writer’s best friend.
If I weren’t a writer, I think I might have thrown myself more enthusiastically into advertising. But, it’s difficult to imagine being a diligent copywriter. It would be quite exasperating for me.
The writer who can’t do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won’t dream of sharing his royalties with that editor.
I do really enjoy Jay McInerney’s wine writing. He’s a good writer. He brings his fiction-writing skillset. He’s not afraid to put wine in kind of a racy context and speak very candidly about it.
I consider myself a writer, foremost – a nonfiction writer.
Your worst enemy as a writer – especially one working online a lot of the time – is obscurity.
I love New York, and I’m drawn to a certain intensity of life, but I’ve just never felt like I want to escape from the Midwest. A writer lives a great deal in his own head, and so one intuitively finds places where your head is more clear. New York for me is one of those places.
Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient.
I am neither a writer nor a theorist. For a person who creates things to utter too many words means to regulate himself – a frightening prospect.
I think self-doubt, as grim as it can be, makes me a better writer. Stasis and hubris would probably be the death knell for my career.
There’s no reason you shouldn’t, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
One of my favorites is ‘Parks and Recreation.’ Great show; awesome writing; beautiful, diverse cast. They also have a very diverse writer’s room, which I love.
I think social media is… really cool in the sense that I don’t think that a writer like me would’ve found a readership if maybe Instagram wasn’t there.
My dad is a great writer. Naturally talented, naturally charming. He embodies that back-in-the-day cool.
The writer’s duty is to keep on writing.
If I’ve done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.
You’re meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there’s a lot to be said for a very happy one that just lets you get on with it.
I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.
The mystery form was very helpful for me as a beginning writer because mystery novels and suspense novels have a beginning, a middle and an end.
I like being a writer.
It’s important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he’s writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering.
If you exile a writer, however free the country he is sent to, there will always be a sense of internal constraint.
The writer I feel the most affinity with – you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they’re 18th century novels – is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he’s the guy who does it for me.
Having a writer in the family is a curse – for the family. I do feel more or less guilty when I’m writing.
If I had to summarize, most broadly, my concerns as a writer, I’d say the question ‘How then must we live?’ is at the heart of it, for me.
