My aunt got me interested in journalism – she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, ‘Play like you’re a writer.’
You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.
A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye.
I’m not a writer on a mission, and I’m very suspicious of writers on missions, but I’m also not living a false life.
I was a writer before ‘Eat, Pray, Love,’ and I’ll be a writer after it’s over. It’s what I want to do for the rest of my life.
I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains.
In my next incarnation, I want to be a writer.
You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.
You don’t know what you need when you’re a young writer. You can get small slivers of critical input, advice, comments, but if you’re deep in the perplexity of your own process, as you should be, sorting it out in your own way, nothing is going to guide you more than small gestures of encouragement.
I still always think the greatest moment for me, as a writer, is when I press that button and send the first draft of the script.
I’m a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.
To do justice to a lifelong dream of being a writer, I must give it the intense concentration and focus I gave to track. To do both with excellence is not possible. It is with a sense of sadness and joyous anticipation that I leave track and move on.
Writing is a very strenuous thing – it’s like banging your head against a wall. At the end of the day, acting is better, just because nobody ever asked me if I wanted a Pellegrino in the writer’s room.
Easy reading is damn hard writing. But if it’s right, it’s easy. It’s the other way round, too. If it’s slovenly written, then it’s hard to read. It doesn’t give the reader what the careful writer can give the reader.
If you only hear one side of the story, at some point, you have to question who the writer is.
All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he’s a writer. It’s an aphrodisiac.
One likes to think one grows as a writer as one ages, else all you get is an ‘old’ young writer. Beyond that is the changing landscape of the universe and the stories I choose to tell.
I became a script writer with absolutely no idea of how to write a script whatsoever. I still feel a bit of an outsider in that regard. If I can maintain that approach to screenwriting, it can continue to be enjoyable.
Capra always wanted a screenwriter with him, even on the soundstage. The writer had to be there at his side.
For me, screenwriting is all about setting characters in motion and as a writer just chasing them. They should tell you what they’ll do in any scene you put them in.
David O. Russell is probably my favorite filmmaker. He’s not only a great director, but he’s also a great writer.
A good writer is basically a story teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.
Having been an actor and a writer for so long – 20 years or so – I felt that it would be daft to go to one’s grave without having directed. It’s a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.
The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.
When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God’s business.
Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
I wasn’t trying to be an outlaw writer. I never heard of that term; somebody else made it up. But we were all outside the law: Kerouac, Miller, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Kesey; I didn’t have a gauge as to who was the worst outlaw. I just recognized allies: my people.
I know who I am and what I’m doing in my life and what I’ve accomplished and continue to accomplish as a performer, as a writer, as an artist, as a person, as a human being.
It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
You know you lose a lot of social skills if you’re a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that.
If you’re a writer, you just keep following the path – keep going deeper and deeper into the things that interest you.
You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual. Most of them are mangled and even have made up stuff in them, that is to say, made up stuff by the writer or editor.
But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.
I think that if a writer doesn’t use her voice, be it in her writing or online or in real life, then what is the point of having one?
We love to start from a real place, whether it’s us or our friends or working on a story from a writer’s friend.
I don’t know if I am a good, average, or bad writer, but I write fast. Everything I observe, my experiences and imagination come together while writing.
As a food writer, it’s my job to know each and every cuisine on this planet as well as I can.
If you wish to be a writer, write.
I know a lot of crime writers feel very underrated, like they’re not taken seriously, and they want to be just thought of as writers rather than ghettoised as crime writers, but I love being thought of firmly as a crime writer.
In a weird way, I never wanted – I don’t consider myself a very good writer. I consider myself okay; I don’t consider myself great. There’s Woody Allen and Aaron Sorkin. There’s Quentin Tarantino. I’m not ever gonna be on that level. But I do consider myself a good filmmaker.
In general, a writer would like to think that the best book that he has written is the book that he is writing, and the next book will be even better. Maybe if this is not true, it is very useful to keep the illusion alive.
I did several interesting jobs, working in restaurants, I worked at a lab rat farm, feeding and watering all these rats. Then I got a full-time job as a technical writer for a large scientific research laboratory.
A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.
A writer’s ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years’ time and for one reader in a hundred years’ time.
I felt a failure because I couldn’t sustain myself from what I earned from my writing. My day jobs were what mattered, and it was hard to even get those because universities wouldn’t hire me as a real writer.
Fast food is hugely important in the life of a comedy writer. All we do is order in, and what we’re going to eat is hotly debated.
A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.
From the moment I wrote ‘Leaf Storm’ I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.
My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called ‘The Southern Planter.’ He didn’t think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I’d seen him working at his desk. I just assumed that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer.
Before we started shooting ‘Homecoming,’ we were in the writer’s room for ‘Mr. Robot.’ I was also editing Season 3 of ‘Mr. Robot’ while I was prepping for the ‘Homecoming’ shoot. So yeah, it’s a lot of hats.
There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot.
The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn’t have a personal point of view, it’s impossible to be a creator.
I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.
For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.
It is my desire to be a great writer. I know that I still have a mountain to climb to achieve that.
I had liver disease. I’m completely cured now, but I thought about if I died from liver cancer, what my life would look like. I followed this wish of being a fiction writer.
Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader.
The good thing about not speaking the language is you just listen. You listen to everyone, every producer, every writer.
