I have been called ‘The American De Maupassant.’ Well, I never wrote a filthy word in my life, and I don’t like to be compared to a filthy writer.
I cling to the idea that Herman Melville had to work at the end of his career watching ships in a dock, as a shipping agent in New York. Any writer who thinks they should be given patronage because of their gift… you don’t have to look too far in history to see that’s just not the case.
As a guest who doesn’t eat, drink or smoke, you leave much to be desired, but as a writer, you’re my girl.
You know, that’s kind of the thing, I can’t freestyle and I used to always wonder why I couldn’t, and when I would try once out of every six months, but I was always a great writer!
As a professional writer of detective stories, I string along with the ballplayers. I love a ball game.
The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.
I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone’s scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that’s how I write.
The highest compliment one can give a writer is not to say that one wholeheartedly agrees with his observations, but that he provoked – really, forced – difficult thinking about consequential matters and internal questioning of one’s own assumptions, often without quick or clear resolution.
Hemingway was a jerk. I mean he was really a great jerk. He was a good writer, and he did all sorts of things that I would never have the courage to do, but I don’t think I’d enjoy being in the same room with him. He’s not my kind of person.
My point of view as a writer has to be a lot more ego-less than just like being some performer on stage with a hairdo.
I suppose my Iranian identity is one of the driving forces for being a writer: I want to set the record straight about who I really am.
I didn’t become a good writer until I learned how to rewrite. And I don’t just mean fixing spelling and adding a comma. I rewrite each of my books five or six times, and each time I change huge portions of the story.
In Britain, we need to start presenting the option of being a writer in front of black women. We need to present the idea of being a writer into poorer communities because the majority of black people in this country are working class. We need to let working-class people know that their voices are important.
When you’re writing a book, with people in it as opposed to animals, it is no good having people who are ordinary, because they are not going to interest your readers at all. Every writer in the world has to use the characters that have something interesting about them, and this is even more true in children’s books.
The more you live, the better writer you are.
I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.
To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean.
A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer.
I realize that I am typically vulnerable only when and where and how much it suits me. I can choose my writer words and even go back and edit.
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
I’ve found I can plunge the characters into whatever absurd, awful situation, and readers will follow as long as the writer makes them seem like ‘real people.’
I still can’t quite believe it. Although there was something about the fact that it was a first-time writer, a first-time producer, and a first-time director all at the same time.
Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.
It seems to me that there are two kinds of trickery: the ‘fronts’ people assume before one another’s eyes, and the ‘front’ a writer puts on the face of reality.
I have a writer’s memory which makes everything worse than maybe it actually was.
I think that, as a writer, while it’s your job to construct stories, you have to navigate your way through them with your heart.
Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.
Then there was Clark Ashton Smith, who wrote for Weird Tales and who had a wild imagination. He wasn’t a very talented writer, but his imagination was wonderful.
At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.
As the writer, you’re always a presence in the song. If you get close to what human beings are like, you’re writing about common experience. We all do much the same things, so if you nail somebody, then you’ve also nailed yourself.
As a writer, you’re not even at the party when you work in film. At best, you’re the one laying out the canapes.
I’m not really a mass market writer.
I wrote my first book at 20, but my whole focus from about the age of 12 was to be a writer.
I really believe that a writer is someone who has trained their mind to misbehave.
You know, I look to myself mainly as a creative writer all my life and a medical doctor.
This sort of encouragement is vital for any writer. And lastly the publication of Touching the Flame, which was on hold for two years and went through a few publishers before finding a stable home.
So must the writer, whose productions should Take with the vulgar, be of vulgar mould.
The writer’s language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language.
I used to want to be a children’s writer, because I would have all these great ideas when I was little, and I’d write them and draw them, and turn them into class.
When you start out as a TV writer, you get a lot of pressure from outside forces to fit into what they think people want.
I don’t want to make a comfortable film. I’m not interested in that. I’m not interested in answering people’s questions; I’m interested in posing questions. I’m interested in sparking a conversation between two people about what something means. That’s enough for me, as a writer and as a director.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Fidel Castro’s most scandalous show trial was not mounted against a political figure but against a writer: Heberto Padilla. In 1971, after 38 days of detention, Mr. Padilla was forced to ‘confess’ at the Cuban writers’ union to the charges of ‘subversive activities.’
It is very difficult for a writer of my generation, if he is honest, to pretend indifference to the work of Somerset Maugham. He was always so entirely there.
Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
My goal as a writer is more to comfort than to disturb.
That’s my contribution – running a sound, healthy company that serves millions of customers well and employs hundreds of thousands of people. What else am I going to do? I’m not an artist. I’m not a writer. I’m not a musician. I’d love to be a tennis player or musician. I’m not.
There’s a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer’s head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it’s going to.
Above all, a query letter is a sales pitch and it is the single most important page an unpublished writer will ever write. It’s the first impression and will either open the door or close it. It’s that important, so don’t mess it up. Mine took 17 drafts and two weeks to write.
The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the ‘personality-cult’ of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself.
A writer must experiment with genres. Otherwise, it is a restriction on the craft.
It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.
I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you’ve written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer’s memory that filters experience, but the reader’s as well.
I wanted to be a writer since I was a little girl – long before I was a musician and a songwriter.
My ambition, a long time ago, was to be a film music writer. A compromise then was to be the guy who wrote songs for a band and played slide guitar. Then the singer didn’t turn up for an audition, and I was the only one who knew the words. That was it – bingo! Life took a different course.
The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn’t find a place for myself, for years and years.
