Words matter. These are the best Writers Quotes from famous people such as Aimee Bender, Amitava Kumar, Sophie Hannah, Tim LaHaye, William Devane, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Some creative writing programs seem evil, but my experience at Irvine was totally the opposite, where I feel like they were really good at focusing in on each writers voice and setting. When I felt like I was obligated to write a story that was more typical, no one really liked it.
Indian writers in English are rank individualists. Even among the progressives, there is a strain of anti-leftism, or at least a suspicion of any organized politics.
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.
New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.
There’s a certain possessiveness of writers sometimes.
Writers of fiction should stick to writing, not pop up on panel shows or as a talking head.
What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer’s life with the writing. I think that’s something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now.
There’s that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.
There may be something to the suggestion about the pace of technological change intimidating writers, though – it’s been awfully hard to keep ahead of real developments.
Science fiction writers aren’t fortune tellers. Fortune tellers are fakes.
They’re naughty, all those writers – they mess around with people. I know James Gandolfini got a bit fed up on ‘The Sopranos’: if he said anything in front of a writer, told them a story from his life, it could make its way into the script.
Writers are so important.
Now that I’m taking some time off from school, I’ve been reading a lot to make sure I don’t forget everything. It’s mostly classics and nonfiction accounts from actors, directors and writers from the ’40s and ’50s.
That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn’t it? I know it’s possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.
Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.
I think a lot of writers spend years just getting up the courage to write because it seems like such a fantasy of a profession. My dad saved me all that time by making me think, ‘Oh, anyone can be a writer. It’s like being a firefighter or a lawyer.’
I think it’s a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it’s better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots.
Writers don’t retire. I will always be a writer.
I wish one time in my life I could do what other writers do… get me a villa in Spain and go there to write a book.
Writers have always been very underrated.
There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers – encouraging them to die.
Tchaikovsky was one of the great melody writers of all time.
I’ve discovered writers by reading books left in airplane seats and weird hotels.
Writers are frequently asked why they wrote their first book. A more interesting answer might come from asking them why they wrote their second one.
I’m very aware when I share a stage with other writers that I’m much less driven than they are. I don’t wake up in the middle of the night, pregnant with paragraphs. I don’t suffer for my text twenty-four hours a day.
I distrust thought. The interior life is highly overrated. I don’t like the wispy and the vague… or inductive logic in any kind of writing. I’m impatient with writers who make too much sense. The better things that I’ve done have come to me by instinct.
In New York I was always so scared of saying that I wrote fiction. It just seemed like, ‘Who am I to dare to do that thing here? The epicenter of publishing and writers?’ I found all that very intimidating and avoided writing as a response.
I don’t think, generally speaking, people become writers because they were the really good, really cool, attractive kid in class. I’ll be honest. This is our revenge for people who were much better looking and more popular than us. I was a bit like that, I suppose.
Things like ‘mad as a hatter’ or ‘grinning like a Cheshire cat’, are so powerful that music and songs incorporate the imagery. Writers, artists, illustrators, a lot of them have incorporated that.
I think for writers who write that kind of stuff, they want to make changes. Look at Kris Kristofferson and Dylan. I mean, whole generations come along liking that stuff and that’s great.
Writers will happen in the best of families.
Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.
I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.
Gay writers now have both a sense of history and the fables that allows them to dwell in the realms of the ridiculous and at the same time talk seriously about things.
Since fantasy isn’t about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it’s changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!
I work every morning, all morning, sometimes in the afternoons. Then sometimes I hunt in the afternoons – quail, doves, grouse up north – but just to stay alive, because writers die from their lifestyle but also from their lack of movement.
One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support, and it’s really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here, where they’re all trying to murder each other.
At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers’ groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.
Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they’re on a tour.
As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.
It fills my heart with pride and joy that international food writers and press have taken an interest in Tijuana.
I’m more influenced by my own interests than anyone else’s. Writers have to entertain themselves, or they can’t entertain anyone else.
I really like scripted dramas. My favorite show of all time would have to be ‘Lost’: I loved how the writers and producers were able to weave the different storylines together; and the acting in that show was incredible.
Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.
I don’t think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can’t teach them is the very essence of poetry.
Literature is always trying to show other parts of this immense universe in which we live. It’s endless. I’m sure there will be other writers who will discover new worlds.
As soon as I started writing, other writers stopped wanting me acting in their shows – maybe they thought I was going to rewrite them.
The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.
Most people don’t see what’s going on around them. That’s my principal message to writers: ‘For God’s sake, keep your eyes open. Notice what’s going on around you.’
There are writers out there who say they’re writing a second series, and then you pick it up and it feels exactly the same, only the lead character is blonde instead of brunette.
There are so many stories to be told, by so many good writers.
I have a great job writing for ‘The Office,’ but, really, all television writers do is dream of one day writing movies. I’ll put it this way: At the Oscars the most famous person in the room is, like, Angelina Jolie. At the Emmys the huge exciting celebrity is Bethenny Frankel. You get what I mean.
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It’s always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
I had to prepare physically every day, and I didn’t leave many scraps for the writers.
I do tend to feel more connected to dead writers, perhaps because they have finished their work.
Writers are lampposts and critics are dogs. Ask lampposts what they think about dogs. Does the dog hurt the lamppost?
The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is don’t do it unless you’re willing to give your whole life to it. Red wine and garlic also helps.
An actor is somebody who communicates someone else’s words and emotions to an audience. It’s not me. It’s what writers want me to be.
True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.
I haven’t stuck to any formula. Most great writers stick to the same style, but I wanted to be more various.
Dave and I had been song writers in Nashville, trying to get around, out hustling, trying to meet people. We randomly met Hillary out in town one night. She said she was a singer. I asked her if she would like to write some songs with Dave and me, and a week later she came over. Instantaneously we had this chemistry.
Sex and death, the magnetic poles of fiction, attract us children’s writers no less than adult authors, but we have to be more leery of their pull.
I spend days with writers’ block. It is a problem.
See, what I don’t like listening to is when writers go, ‘And then the person cries.’ ‘Or the person does this.’ It’s there, but it’s not the Bible. I wait and see what happens to me on the day.
How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love; and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often.
From the beginnings of literature, poets and writers have based their narratives on crossing borders, on wandering, on exile, on encounters beyond the familiar. The stranger is an archetype in epic poetry, in novels. The tension between alienation and assimilation has always been a basic theme.
Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I’ll go a step further. You must be bisexual.
Live an interesting life. Meet people. Read a lot and widely, learn from the great writers.
With network shows, writers can be so protective of every syllable.
The Songwriters Hall of fame, that’s the one all the big-time writers get into, the really great stuff, the Broadway stuff and all that. That would be something, to get your name in there.
We all know funny people who can’t get it down on the page – even funny writers who can’t get it down on the page.
Russia itself is an extremely complex country, and sometimes I feel like all of that comes back to haunt me. I can see why so many Russian writers were so tortured.
It is certain, indeed, that the sacred writers were apt to make great allowances for people with empty stomachs, and though I am well aware that the present profane ones think this very reprehensible, I venture to agree with the sacred writers.
I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didn’t have any phone service and we didn’t have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed.
Australian SF book publishing has undergone a boom recently, and sometimes it’s easier for new writers to sell a book to a local publisher first, which then makes a US edition more likely.
Dreaming in public is an important part of our job description, as science writers, but there are bad dreams as well as good dreams. We’re dreamers, you see, but we’re also realists, of a sort.
I’m an ecumenical reader, grew up with all sorts of fiction, teach writing, went to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, so my tastes and interests are broad.
I am not a political writer. I agree with Stieg Larsson and Henning Mankell, who are social writers. I can’t write in that fashion. I am not good enough for that. What I am interested in is family dramas and why we are doing bad things to each other and what our motives are.
I have been fortunate to have worked with immensely talented writers and directors who have had faith in me. There’s been very little hard work but a lot of learning. I have learnt from each of my characters, and I think that’s rather amazing.
It is one of the paradoxes of American literature that our writers are forever looking back with love and nostalgia at lives they couldn’t wait to leave.
I did go to an MFA program, at Bowling Green State University in Ohio. For me, it worked perfectly. It was a small program. They only take five fiction writers a year, and they fund all of us – you don’t go into debt to get an MFA. It’s not like getting an MBA – you’re not going to buy yourself out.
It’s a bit of a crapshoot out there with young writers right now anyway.
I’m more concerned with getting them to find and strengthen their original voice as writers rather than imposing my own subjective tastes, judgements or sensibility on the project.
All of my comedian friends are some of the best joke writers in the world.
Writers who used to show off their erudition no longer sing in the bare ruined choir of the media.
Fiction writers tend to err either making people more than they are or less than they are. I’d rather err on the side of the former.
I just can’t say enough about the actors having faith and trust in the writers and the writers having faith and trust in the actors.
I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish – occasionally I do windows.
Lyrics have to be underwritten. That’s why poets generally make poor lyric writers because the language is too rich. You get drowned in it.
Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds.
There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.
Why do writers, say, give up a job in economics and decide to write poetry? Or, why do they give up a job in a bank and decide to paint, like Krishan Khanna? They want to convey something.
My first thought when I came here was that I understood why there are so many great Irish writers – because there is something mystical in the air. There’s always this cloudy, moody sky and it’s challenging.
Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.
Unlike the majority of the writers of his age, La Rochefoucauld was an aristocrat; and this fact gives a peculiar tone to his work.
I’m one of those writers who, when writing, believes she’s god-and that she hasn’t bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.
All writers are vampires.
There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn’t even mentioned.
Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes.
Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent… Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.
I know there are writers who feel unhappy with domesticity and who even manufacture domestic turmoil in order to have something to write about. With me, though, the happier I feel, the better I write.
You know, actors say, ‘There are no bad roles, there are only bad actors.’ Well, comedians, because they’re also writers, believe that there are in fact bad roles.
My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers – Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.
I often find that writers who disavow the importance of an ending are just not very good at endings.
I love co-writing. That whole process is a challenge in that good writers are pushing you.
Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in.
Finding people who get enormous pleasure from reading books is a more and more unusual experience, and so writers just so much want to be heard.
Writers have been in terrible situations and have yet managed to produce extraordinary work.
The decision to write in prose instead of poetry is made more by the readers than by writers. Almost no one is interested in reading narrative in verse.
France is not poetic; she even feels, in fact, a congenital horror of poetry. Among the writers who use verse, those whom she will always prefer are the most prosaic.
Every time I make American film I just trust American directors and American writers.
What helps writers, and ultimately, obviously, helps the actors – who should serve the words that the writer puts on the page – is if the character has damages, because then the writers can cultivate and excavate, like a dentist going into a tooth.
Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright.
And you can tell the writers who do it – Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.
I never want to be called the funniest Indian female comedian that exists. I feel like I can go head-to-head with the best white, male comedy writers that are out there. Why would I want to self-categorize myself into a smaller group than I’m able to compete in?
Some writers like to work in other places like coffee shops, but I can’t – I’d end up people-watching. And if I were at a bookstore, I’d be reading. Sometimes I have some music on, but usually I like it quiet.
Why my interest in writers? Well, I’m one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it’s like to write. I’m interested in the creative process. I’m fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.
There’s something very misleading about the literary culture that looks at writers in their 30s and calls them ‘budding’ or ‘promising’, when in fact they’re peaking.
Similarly, anyone who wishes to understand the mind of the sacred writers must first cleanse his own life, and approach the saints by copying their deeds.
One of the writers I most admire is Hilary Mantel because in the middle of her career, she just changed paths entirely and became just a totally different novelist.
You can take wonderfully talented actors, wonderfully talented writers and producers, and, uh, do a wonderful show!… but if it doesn’t hit with the public in two minutes, it’s bye-bye.
Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it’s more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody’s interested in a single.
It wasn’t until I was an adult reader that I began to fathom the influence of fairy tales on writers I was in love with over the years, from Louisa May Alcott to Bernard Malamud to John Cheever to Anne Frank to Joy Williams.
I read every screenplay that was being sent to the other directors. None were being sent to me, but I was reading what others were choosing and what the best writers were writing.
Television in the last few years has been where all the great writers are going. TV now is what indie film used to be.
My most frequent collaborators at S.N.L. are the incredibly gifted writers Chris Kelly and Sarah Schneider!
If you want to know why all writers are a little crazy read ‘The Midnight Disease’ by Alice W. Flaherty. She talks about the drive to write, writer’s block, and the creative brain. I know what’s wrong with me!
I must apologise because I know all writers have memories of being on the outer because it’s the children on the side of the playground who become the dangerous writers.
I did a lot of studying of great writers. I read that Hemingway rewrote ‘The Sun Also Rises’ 39 times.
Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
People have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other’s work.
Advice to beginning SF writers? Write a lot, finish what you write, and when it’s done, keep sending it out for quite awhile.
Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile.
When you’re doing a pilot, you’re doing it in this bubble that almost works against the creative impulse. You don’t have time to get to know the actors first, and you have three writers, as opposed to a room full of writers.
Special-interest magazines are dangerous places for writers to start out in because the writing quickly falls into a routine and people are likely to find themselves artistically exhausted when they want to work on something of their own.
I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do.
Since, therefore, individuals as well as the public are so indebted to these writers for the benefits they enjoy, I think them not only entitled to the honour of palms and crowns, but even to be numbered among the gods.
Writing careers are short. For every 100 writers, 99 never get published. Of those who do, only one in every hundred gets a career out of it, so I count myself as immensely privileged.
But I was, and still am, an avid reader and so when I first started I chose to photograph many of the great writers in this country to try and earn a living.
I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.
It cannot be said often enough that science fiction as a genre is incredibly educational – and I’m speaking the written science fiction, not ‘Star Trek.’ Science fiction writers tend to fill their books if they’re clever with little bits of interesting stuff and real stuff.
In the present time you don’t really establish what you’re going through, but after time it’s declared something. Right now there could be some writers doing something expressing their thoughts in a whole different style that we’re not aware of. This could be the ‘in-between the notes generation.’
Together with script writers Sid Green and Dick Hills, we worked on the comedy ideas for this series.
More than fantasy or even science fiction, Ray Bradbury wrote horror, and like so many great horror writers he was himself utterly without fear, of anything. He wasn’t afraid of looking uncool – he wasn’t scared to openly love innocence, or to be optimistic, or to write sentimentally when he felt that way.
There are some good songs, but not the kind of song-writing that I remember, that I like. Springsteen still does it. Paul Simon, and there are also good writers, but that doesn’t dominate the charts.
We hear about the Gershwins, the Kerns, and the Berlins, but there were some great little writers like Theodore Morse, Charles K. Harris, and Ernest R. Ball, who wrote ‘Let the Rest of the World Go By.’
It had more layers than an onion. These writers meant business. There was a level for everybody. Your major could be celestial mechanics, and there’d be celestial-mechanics jokes.
Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.
And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write – every day, no excuses. It’s so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they’d rather clean the toilet than do the writing.
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.
Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.
Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn’t have much time for anything else.
Comedy writers have the most fragile egos.
When I went from being an academic to being a member of the community of writers some of my former colleagues did look on me with a certain resentment.
Writers always say, ‘I always knew I wanted to be a writer; when I was a three-month-old foetus a pen formed in my hand and I began to scratch my first story on the inside of my mother’s womb.’ I started later, in my early twenties.
Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.
Broadcasters or politicians or writers who think that they are respecting Struggle Street, the battlers, by dumbing things down into one-line sound bites are not respecting them, they are treating them with contempt. It’s our job above all in politics to tackle the big issues and to explain them.
There are times over different projects when I’ve asked the writers why people are swearing for no good reason. I tell them that it would be funnier if there weren’t these swear words.
Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can’t be disproved or shown to be false.
Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.
Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.
I don’t usually like teen novels written in the present tense, particularly those told from a first-person viewpoint. Too many writers seem to believe that using either or both devices automatically imbues their stories with deep seriousness and a contemporary feel.
Audiences want to watch heroine-oriented films, and even writers are writing scripts for women. I am very happy to see this change.
The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is to write the book that you would want to read, and hope other people agree.
Although it was in primitive times and differently called the Lord’s day or Sunday, yet it was never denominated the Sabbath; a name constantly appropriate to Saturday, or the Seventh day both by sacred and ecclesiastical writers.
I learned what I really love is making films, not the film business. I want to be on the set, meeting with writers, I want that freedom. I love it now.
It is very true to say that work done by writers is quite often an attempt to give solid expression to that which is bothering them… They feel they have got it right if they express the stress.
I’m always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.
I love sports, as all Bostonians seem to. I love books and movies, as all writers seem to.
I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer.
I think a lot of writers are tempted to add complexity by over-complicating things, but always remember that most natural rules/laws are, at their core, simple. Start simple, and build from there, or you risk getting yourself and your readers tangled.
Since music is a reflection of our mindset and our culture, it is bound to change with time. I am glad that India is such a receiving country and is always open to all kinds of music. Our composers, singers and writers are open to experimenting.
The daily act of writing remains as demanding and maddening as it was before, and the pleasure you get from writing – rare but profound – remains at the true heart of the enterprise. On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.
I’ve always loved science fiction. I think the smartest writers are science fiction writers dealing with major things.
At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It’s extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writers.
One of the most talented writers out there is Brian Haig.
I think it’s so fun when I get to work with women writers in particular because we really understand the core story or foundation as women. That’s so important to me that the authenticity is there, you know, from the place that I speak from for my women. Having other females with me helps me dig deeper.
I’ve been trying to find women writers for my staff for a while now and I have three women on my staff and three guys so it’s pretty equal. I don’t know why that is. It’s been the same thing for a while. It’s hard for female comedians to stand out. That’s weird. That’s a shame.
It’s definitely true that there are a lot of the devices we used on ‘Star Trek,’ that came out the imagination of the writers, and the creators that are actually in the world today.
As writers we must, from our very opening sentence, speak with authority to our readers.
I think marriage is one of those things that writers draw on, one of those emotional reservoirs that go way back.
Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard.
Remember Graham Green’s dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
You could name the great stars of the silent screen who were finished; the great directors gone; the great title writers who were washed up. But remember this, as long as you live: the producers didn’t lose a man. They all made the switch. That’s where the great talent is.
That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing.
When they do bring on new people, it’s good for the show. It’s like getting a new toy. The writers enjoy it because it’s a whole new character that they can write for, one that they aren’t used to writing for. They can try different things.
Largely this is a class thing – writers tend to be cosseted little middle-class kiddies who think that the world owes them a royalty cheque. But just doing it – being in your room for years on end, locked in your head, alone with invented ghosts – it weakens and softens the body. And I know I can’t just live in my head.
Human nature is not amenable to prediction based on the trends or tendencies prevailing at the time. It is amenable to startling creativity of the kind practiced by great artists, directors, writers, musicians, actors, who know how to touch a chord in humans everywhere.
I mean, there are some amazing storytelling being done on the small screen right now. That’s what so cool about being in television right now. Studios, networks are starting to throw more resources, better writers, more production values… and to be part of that is awesome.
Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul.
There are these boutique writers out there who think if they are not writing their novels sitting at a bistro with their laptops, then they’re not real writers. That’s ridiculous.
There are numerous cases of that, where one of our writers discovers another writer whom he likes, and we then take that book on. So it’s a very close relationship. We can do that because we’re so small.
My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers – it’s what my children call my ‘dead author wall.’ I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.
Many children’s writers don’t have children of their own.
There are many great writers out there and, actually, great scripts. The problem is – and this is what I’ve always felt, even when I got out of school and started reading scripts – the really smart, character-driven stuff tends to be smaller films, and they just don’t get made.
Bob Hope was totally regimented. I go in and say a line like, ‘Hi Bob’ and I’d have to do it five times, and then Bob would take me to the writers to say the line different ways. He wouldn’t let me ad-lib.
How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.
However far fiction writers stray from their own lives and experiences – and I stray pretty far from mine – I think, ultimately, that we may be writing what we need to write in some way, albeit unconsciously.
Writers and politicians are natural rivals. Both groups try to make the world in their own images; they fight for the same territory.
I think writers, by nature, are more observers instead of participators.
I broke in with four hits, and the writers promptly declared they had seen the new Ty Cobb. It took me only a few days to correct that impression.
Writers tell stories better, because they’ve had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.
The great writers just kept bringing them out. They didn’t care if they repeated themselves.
In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.
I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.
You’d never know it from reading the rest of the Native writers, but Indians actually grew up with American pop culture.
My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.
I feel very, very grateful. I’m a lucky guy, you need a lot of luck, and then when the cameras roll, you have to have this group of writers, directors, and actors that just gel, and it seems to literally be happening more and more.
Only bad writers think they’re good.
Like my hero Virginia Woolf, I do lack confidence. I always find that the novel I’m finishing, even if it’s turned out fairly well, is not the novel I had in my mind. I think a lot of writers must negotiate this, and if they don’t admit it, they’re not being honest.
People keep saying that books will never die out. Well, books may never die out, but hundreds of thousands of individual writers will, and for them, it’s as if books did die out.
I think a lot of writers, male and female, write as if their parents were killed in a car accident when they were 2, and they have no one to hold accountable. And unfortunately, I don’t have that. I have parents who I care about what they think.
At this stage I am not involved with young adults as closely as many other writers. My children are grown up and my grandchildren are still quite young.
A storyteller is basically what actors and writers are.
Years ago, when I was writing westerns, other writers who were friends of mine wanted me to collaborate with them. And it just didn’t work.
Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness.
I know what it’s like to be brought up by actors and writers.
It feels as though a very disproportionate number of main characters are writers, because that’s what the writer knows. Fair enough. But nothing bothers me more in a movie than an actor playing a writer, and you just know he’s not a writer. Writers recognize other writers. Ethan Hawke is too hot to be a writer.
At the height of the McCarthy period, writers were being hounded.
I never considered myself a writer. I’m a teacher. In a way, I feel kind of… kind of guilty for all the people who are writers who hope to be on the best-seller list someday, who live for that and don’t get it, and it came to me as a kind of free gift, like God coming to Abraham and announcing, ‘I’ve chosen you!’
Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
There are writers who pour out words, concepts that sound really important but that basically say nothing. I always tried to be as concise as possible, all to try and reach everyone, but especially the simple people, those who needed to be reached more than anyone else.
Writers are not just people who sit down and write. They hazard themselves. Every time you compose a book your composition of yourself is at stake.
Today, writers want to impress other writers.
I think one of the things the writers’ festival does that is very good is that it brings writers from around the world and around the country and locally and puts them all in the one spot together, and that’s what a lot of the world’s great writers’ festivals do.
Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You’d think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it’s not.
World War II was a trauma that paralysed writers. It was something metaphysical, diabolical.
Why would they have gone to the trouble to hire the best comedy writers in the business to write funny material for us to play straight, if the children in our audience were the only audience.
Between us and the writers, it was comedy hour the whole time. We could hardly get through it.
When I started, the music I would be drawn to would be heavy metal and new wave like Black Sabbath – things that seemed more shocking – and then, of course, eventually I would find bands and writers who were laying things out very clearly and whose words felt very sharp to the touch and sharp to your feelings.
How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
As the editor at the Village Voice, I always tried to find writers of colour.
If writers were good businessmen, they’d have too much sense to be writers.
Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House.
I’m very happy to hear that my work inspires writers and painters. It’s the most beautiful compliment, the greatest reward. Art should always be an exchange.
But it also became the experience, or was the experience, of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They’re all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.
I think film had a terrible effect on horror fiction particularly in the 80s, with certain writers turning out stuff as slick and cliched as Hollywood movies.
Artists don’t talk about art. Artists talk about work. If I have anything to say to young writers, it’s stop thinking of writing as art. Think of it as work.
Writers, actors, anybody working on an ensemble-type thing, there are going to be some creaks in the beginning. It seems like there’s tremendous potential in just letting things sort of breathe a little bit. It’s tremendously important.
I’m not one of those writers that sits worrying about posthumous fame.
My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: ‘Writers write because they weren’t invited to a party.’ That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.
I want to support other women because of the opportunities I’ve had – and I’ve had a lot of opportunities. What I try as a female director is to do the best job I can and, in the meantime, bring attention to as many other female directors and writers as I can.
Some writers can only deal with childhood experience, because it’s complete. For another kind of writer, life goes on, and he’s able to keep processing that as well.
It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers – for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.
Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon, and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.
My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.
What makes revolutionary thought unique is its clarity and dignity, and its clear grasp of freedom and justice: simple, clear words that are understood without the need for any help from elite writers or thinkers.
Writers don’t have to keep themselves honest. They have to keep themselves accurate.
I want to just go to places where writers don’t usually go, where people like me don’t usually show up, and say, ‘Here are some poems. Do they speak to you? What do you hear in them?’
I think, to give our bookshelf a little credit, our area of the library and the bookstore has attracted stronger writers as it’s started to thrive.
So, we come out to Los Angeles. And we met with every network. We met with show runners, directors, writers, everything. And what we had an idea for, they didn’t like. And what they had an idea for, we didn’t like. So, we went home.
I’m definitely one of those actresses who comes to a set knowing how I want to do a scene, and I definitely love input from my directors and my writers. I know that there’s some actors who like to be left alone, they like to be very independent, but I actually really enjoy the teamwork.
On the other hand, I mean, that is what writers have always been supposed to do, was to rely on their own devices and to – I mean, writing is a lonely business.
When I started, there were no big interviews, no television, no profiles and all that. The publishers were quite shockingly uncommercial, but they did look after their writers.
I don’t think I ever got the hang of the writers’ room. I love collaborating with people, but I really do my best work alone, and I think I would want to – if I did something again, I think I’d want to take total ownership the way Aaron Sorkin or David Kelley does.
I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault.
Our job as writers and thinkers in the time is how to bring about the occasions that let people have that first-person experience – or the metaphoric experience that allows them to see human continuity as opposed to total threat, total willingness to do violence.
All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.
Writers’ bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor’s early wake-up call.
The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.
I suppose all writers worry about the well running dry.
Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.
One of the surprising things I hadn’t expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren’t comfortable with that. I don’t have a problem with that.
And I have the support of the writers: I have a great relationship with the creative team, and they have a good hold of my character and my personality, and they come up with some great stuff, and I’m forever trying to change it up, keep it fresh.
My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly – all these make for great stories.
What I take from writers I like is their economy – the ability to use language to very effective ends. The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words – that’s magical.
I have one really nice watch. It’s a white-face, stainless-steel Rolex Daytona. I wear it a lot. I got that in the middle of ‘The Office.’ All the guys in the writers’ room were like, ‘Let’s all get a nice watch.’ We were too busy to upgrade our lives in a big way, but we thought this was a nice symbolic gesture.
Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.
At a magazine, everything you do is edited by a bunch of people, by committee, and a lot of them are, were, or think of themselves as writers. Part of that is because magazines worry about their voice.
In OVW, it was like a different world, pretty much. They had the talent ready to stay around for a while, with guys who weren’t over yet and guys who weren’t retiring yet. With FCW, WWE were a bit more hands-on with the writers.
Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight.
I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.
Unlike a lot of writers, I don’t have any craving to be understood.
I’m one of the lucky writers: plots come easily to me.
Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That’s a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something.
In college, I had a lot of friends who were writers and wanted to be writers and I felt intimidated by it. I just didn’t know if I had any gift or voice and I had no confidence about it.
The original Dean Martin Comedy Hour handed me some hysterical sketches. I’ve got highlights on tons of these variety shows, given to me by their great writers. I’d love to be doing all that again.
I’ve discovered just how symbiotic the relationship is between writers, directors and actors. They ask the same questions and strip down texts in exactly the same way.
If you want to be a writer, don’t worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.
But with writers, there’s nothing wrong with melancholy. It’s an important color in writing.
Less really is more. It’s a tendency of beginning writers to want to prove what they’re talking about by going too far with description. I think you’ve got to keep it short, crisp and clean.
I would love to write more children’s books. There is such a high standard out there for children’s books; there are really amazing writers. It is a fantastic creative outlet and such an amazing teaching tool. The thing I love about kids, too, is it is so imaginative and poetic.
To reconstruct stories and scenes, nonfiction writers must conduct vigorous and responsible research. In fact, narrative requires more research than traditional reportage, for writers cannot simply tell what they learn and know; rather, they must show it.
I get really starstruck and tongue tied when I’m around other writers and the conversation tends not to go well.
I kind of thought the writers were starting to take Taylor and make her kind of down and dirty.
We are the only school in America, drama school in America that trains actors, writers and directors side by side for three years in a master’s degree program, and we want them – to expose them to everything.
The reason actors, artists, writers have agents is because we’ll do it for nothing. That’s a basic fact – you gotta do it.
One of the reasons I like Barthes more than other writers of that ilk is because he had a literary quality.
I find the songs I want to record by listening to as much music as I can. ‘When I hear things I really like, I ask the writers to send me a tape of everything they’ve ever written.
I go to a lot of writers conferences and literary festivals that tend to be in college towns or cities, and I’m eager to see what happens if those same texts and those same questions move outside of those areas to smaller rural communities where there are surely people who read and love poetry.
I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular ‘ism’, but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence.
It’s not a bad thing for a writer not to feel at home. Writers – we’re much more comfortable at parties standing in the corner watching everybody else having a good time than we are mingling.
Writers write these male stereotypes, and it makes it ten times more interesting if a woman says the lines.
We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world.
America is the big subject of the second half of the 20th century, tackled in one form or another by all the great American male writers. You could make a case for saying that it was the only game in town – from Bellow to Roth to Updike to Richard Ford – America was more or less explicitly the leitmotif.
There are few words in the music business or in art that I’ll say people or some writers are overgenerous with words like ‘legend’ or ‘genius’, ‘he’s a pioneer’ and all of that.
Science fiction writers put characters into a world with arbitrary rules and work out what happens.
I think what I would say to my younger self, and probably to younger, just starting-out writers is that a lot of times you’re just afraid to put yourself out there, and it’s uncomfortable because it’s working up the courage to do something, to push yourself to do those things.
I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents.
What I always meant by that was that I do believe that a lot of directors, and writers, and sometimes producers just lose their edge because they haven’t seen anybody or talked to anybody or been with anybody who isn’t a kind of replica of themselves for a long period of time.
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
I think I’ll always be a better playwright than a pundit, but I believe that writers should be public intellectuals and that theater, even more than film, is a place of public debate.
My father, if anything, first and last, was a man of words. He loved stories; he didn’t live for stories, exactly, but I think he lived through stories. I think, like many writers, he loved stories about things he had experienced as much as, if not more than, he loved the experiences themselves.
What has been forgotten is that there were major intellectual breakthroughs in the 1960s, thanks to North American writers of an older generation. There was a rupture in continuity, since most young people influenced by those breakthroughs did not enter the professions.
I think most writers feel like they’re on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us.
I have always thought that writers come with any variety of attributes. Some are capable and some aren’t.
Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.
The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It’ll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers.
I think that most of the children’s writers live in the world that they’ve created, and their children are kind of phantoms that wander around the edge of it in the world, but actually the children’s writers are the children.
I don’t hate humanity and I’m not interested in people who do. Although, it’s funny, actually, some of my favorite writers really do. Like Martin Amis. My dirty secret. ‘London Fields’ is one of my favorite books ever. And it’s indefensible! But he’s so funny… I forgive him everything.
Even the ‘Negro’ shows like ‘Amos and Andy’ and ‘Beulah’ are written largely by white writers – the better to preserve the stereotypes, I imagine.
There are as many routes to writing success as there are writers who got there. My advice, however, applies across the board: read widely, learn the craft by whatever means you can – workshops and writing programs are ideal, but even self-study can work – apply what you learn, and persevere.
I think I’m inspired mostly by other artists that aren’t actors, like writers or singers or artists, for being so brave.
The greatest writers of this age… are aware of the mystery of our existence.
Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I’ve been led astray like that myself at times.
I’m quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.
Many fiction writers eventually want to feel that their work forms a single, unified entity.
I didn’t know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.
I don’t really deeply feel that anyone needs an airtight reason for quoting from the works of writers he loves, but it’s always nice, I’ll grant you, if he has one.
We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.
When Ted Williams was here, inducted into the Hall of Fame 37 years ago, he said he must have earned it, because he didn’t win it because of his friendship with the writers. I guess in that way, I’m proud to be in this company that way.
I want to see the writers strike because the writers, god bless them, are the only true commies we have in Hollywood.
Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.
Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure.
Changes are required as far as scripts are concerned. People need to open up and experiment in story lines. But we don’t have good script writers, producers or directors. The Punjabi industry lacks cinema knowledge and professionalism. It is the saddest part.
My dream as a producer is to be able to build a company that can be a safe haven for artists, for directors and for writers and actors to do what they do best and let them have final edit. I’d like to build something to that effect.
There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
Let’s face it, the great comedians now that are handicapped in the looks department are tremendous writers.
It’s funny. People often compare me to other humor essayists. They’re usually quite nice comparisons; I will accept those gladly. But I am always sort of appalled at the idea of being lumped with other, more chick-y female writers. And the truth is probably that neither comparison is accurate.
Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.
Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That’s why so many of them are in jail.
I think a lot of studios today are run by women, and we are entering a time when a lot of women have evolved in Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade and wanted to become writers and comedians.
At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader’s mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.
We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets.
Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.
Get more women producers, writers, directors. Why should we expect men to do it for us? They can’t.
The first year we actually did a lot of night shooting and the writers weren’t even allowed on location.
So when it was my turn to start developing projects, I knew the writers I wanted to work with, and I had met every head of studio, every executive and a lot of producers. I started finding things, little crumbs off other people’s tables that I would make my own.
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: ‘Why not try writing a novel?’ partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother’s family.
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It’s elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.
I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don’t think your work is quite as universal.
I don’t find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it’s a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together.
It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind.
There’s something with the physical size of America… American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don’t come together in real groups.
I have a lot of respect for people who are great at ad-libbing and for writers and directors who are able to create a scene in which that works. Judd Apatow is fantastic at it. But as an audience member, I like the sound of something that’s been written – I like it to sound written.
You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it’s like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.
As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don’t deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.
It’s a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done.
I do not write by any set time schedule. I realize there are many writers who follow a daily regime where they arise at 6:00 a.m., do some sort of exercise, eat breakfast and then sit down and produce words for a three to four hour period.
I got dumped off ‘The Iron Lady’ a month before they started shooting, and then they brought two new writers on. Then I was brought back on again. I’m just a bit of a rubber ball. I just bounce back.
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.
The classical writers… playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.
This homage has been rendered not to me – for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me – but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius.
In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.
I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.
I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That’s the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don’t talk about football or anything like that.
I’m interested in how artists and writers do this, using art as therapy. Escaping into the worlds we create. We’re all victims and few of us are truly free.
I grew up with an artist father, and my parents’ friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.
An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.
I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they’d be good at.
Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis Thomas, who is no longer alive but is just heroic to me.
Foreign writers – especially Germans – often feel that Shakespeare is really one of them, that he was somehow accidentally born in the wrong country. In much the same way, leftists sense in their bones that he was a radical, rightists that he was a Tory.
I’d never really done comedy before ‘Community,’ so getting to work day in and day out with all these great people, directors, writers, and actors, I feel like I’ve learned a lot.
Those writers that have zero say in their movie adaptations have zero say because they sell it. If you don’t sell it, and you do it yourself, and you wait until the screenplay is ready, you don’t have to worry about that.
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
I’d like to encourage people to please keep reading-and most importantly, to please keep trying new writers. The only way we can bring fresh new material into the field is if people go out and buy it.
The humor is essentially dark for a cartoon and sophisticated. But at the same time, being a cartoon gives the writers more freedom than in a normal sitcom. It always pushes the line that, despite human failings, the Simpsons are really decent people.
I think writers are prone to hyperbole sometimes.
Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn’t fiction at all.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.
What I take from writers I like is their economy – the ability to use language to very effective ends.
Many comedians and comedy writers have shared the childhood experience of learning to joke to protect themselves from neighborhood bullies when challenge or physical defense were not among the sensible options.
I believe that stories find writers, writers don’t find stories. With the ‘Pendragon’ series, I actually had multiple story ideas and decided that instead of writing them individually, I would create a character whose journey would thread them all together.
Writers are completely out of touch with reality.
I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.
Sometimes you have a period piece where you have to research around it but, if the writers have done their homework well enough, the information is all in the script.
Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody’s writing about them. They’re really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.
Stargate by far is the top of the pile when it comes to Sci-Fi. The quality is great. They have really good writers, production design, lighting, wardrobe.
At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that’s good.
For a writer, the Book Festival is interesting because you bump into all these other writers whose work you know, whose names you know, and you have a chance to put a person with the name and the work.
Writers are very much undervalued in the creative process.
All writers are going to have to learn more about science, because it’s such an interesting part of their environment.
The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.
The mercury rule writers also ignored mercury’s special qualities.
I am suspicious of writers who go looking for issues to address. Writers are neither preachers nor journalists. Journalists know much more than most writers about what’s going on in the world. And if you want to change things, you do journalism.
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent. But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers’ work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver.
The writers keep managing to turn the show in on itself, coming up with something that’s well thought-out and miraculous.
If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that’s more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people.
I think mystery writers and thriller writers – whatever genre you want to call it – are taking on some of the biggest, most interesting kind of socioeconomic issues around in a really interesting, compelling way.
I’m one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I’m very good at doing that, but I don’t like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out.
By coincidence and not design, ‘Everstar’ is written and drawn by an all-female creative team, and it makes me smile to think that there may be young female readers out there, future writers and artists, who get to see that comics doesn’t have to be a ‘boys’ club.’
TV is the place that writers want to be.
Presenting the Oscars was the most nerve-racking job I have ever done in show business. It’s very much a live show: they have comedy writers waiting in the wings, and as you come off between presentations, they hand you an appropriate gag to tell.
You have to be careful what you say in front of comedy writers because they will absolutely make fun of it in the next episode.
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
Everywhere I go, I’m asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.
I wouldn’t encourage new writers to start off publishing through electronic media… it still isn’t wide enough for the readership they would need to get a good start.
We have this habit of romanticizing the lives of writers. I remember when I was a kid, I was like, ‘I want to be Kurt Vonnegut.’
My horizon on humanity is enlarged by reading the writers of poems, seeing a painting, listening to some music, some opera, which has nothing at all to do with a volatile human condition or struggle or whatever. It enriches me as a human being.
Well, you know, writers just suck up new experiences – we’re just like the vacuum cleaners of newness.
Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist.
You wanna do a lot of backstory for your character – as an actor, you wanna research that. But on the show, it’s fun to remain in that naive place as you go along, and be able to continue to discover things about your character as the writers come up with them.
I’m pleased to have outsold great writers. But I’m not insane – I realize I am a writer people buy to take on vacation.
I think most writers will say that at the start of each book they think, ‘I’m not sure I can do this.’ But eventually, you reach a magical point where the story suddenly becomes real to you, and you become totally invested in it.
What we are is what we were always meant to be, and that’s writers.
I’ve had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I’ve seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.
I’m a really good team player. That’s what it takes to work in the theater. That’s what it takes to work in a band with musicians and writers.
It hurt me a great deal. It put a lot of pressure on me because I was at a young age and the writers around here and throughout the league starting comparing me to Cobb. It put a lot of pressure on me.
I realized that everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It’s the proving ground for new writers and new ideas.
I mean, first, almost all writers these days teach because they don’t make enough money publishing to live on, to support themselves – people like Tobias Wolff, Anne Beattie, Amy Hempel, Stuart Dybek; a lot of short story writers, for one thing.
Comedians are really writers who don’t have pens and pencils about them, but they riff.
On Memorial Day, I don’t want to only remember the combatants. There were also those who came out of the trenches as writers and poets, who started preaching peace, men and women who have made this world a kinder place to live.
We were a very small circle of writers. Everybody brought to the table their own life experience.
I think it’s great when writers get recognition; it doesn’t happen very often. I just don’t want that writer to be me. Let it be Aaron Sorkin or, you know, somebody good.
Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders.
The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post.
All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts.
I have tons of regrets, but I think that’s one of the reasons that push people to create things. Out of their angst, their regret, comes the best from artists, painters and writers.
Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about.
‘Sleepless’ was a script that had been written by three or four other writers before me, and it never really worked, but it had this amazing ending on the top of the Empire State Building that just worked, no matter what came before it.
And thus it was that I started to wonder why Robert Burns is so important to us. We have other poets, and other writers, and other heroes, yet we do not afford them the veneration that we afford to Robert Burns.
I think writers should create characters who are human and have a character arc of their own.
I think that’s what a lot of writers do, create a totally fantastical scenario that is a reflection of something else going on in their life.
I get so used to working with writers that my prime occupation is development.
In the writers’ room, I know the difference when someone brushes up against me and makes a sexist crack and when they’ve stepped over the line and made me feel uncomfortable and unsafe.
The writers are the stars of every really successful sitcom.
I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged.
I think that like all writers – and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer – I write primarily for myself.
Writers are not always right however, but then again, I’ve been on shows where the actors have complete control and change everything and it’s terrible.
I’ve always seen it as the role of an artist to drag his inside out, give the audience all you’ve got. Writers, actors, singers, all good artists do the same. It isn’t supposed to be easy.
We’ve got a bunch of new writers now who tell me they grew up watching The Simpsons. It’s bizarre, and they’re writing some very funny stuff.
Science fiction writers have usually been very poor prognosticators of the future, either in literary or technological terms, and that’s because we’re all too human and, I think, have the tendency to see what we want to or, in the case of those more paranoid, what we fear.
I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don’t. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It’s a hard way to learn to write. I don’t recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.
And if you want to know why great editors scare the pants off of writers everywhere, read ‘Eats, Shoots and Leaves’ by Lynne Truss. The punctuation police are everywhere!
Poetry is not Irish or any other nationality; and when writers such as Messrs. Clarke, Farren and the late F. R. Higgins pursue Irishness as a poetic end, they are merely exploiting incidental local colour.
I think the special thing about Python is that it’s a writers’ commune. The writers are in charge. The writers decide what the material is.
We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects. You can actually figure out before you work on something how much blood you will have to let emotionally.
My book sales make ‘real writers’ possible.
Well, so far, at least, my own ideas always take priority over those of other writers. As long as the well doesn’t run dry, I imagine this will be the case.
Twitter is the most amazing medium for a comedy writer. I can’t get in every idea I want on the show no matter how hard I try to bully the other writers, so it’s a way of me getting out other comic ideas and immediately getting feedback.
When I was in college, I was the editor of the literary magazine and insisted neither the editors nor the writers be specifically identified-only our student numbers appeared on the title page. I love that idea and still do.
I think I’m also more open to other writers being present and listening to other opinions, whereas before I was going through my angsty teen years while making records.
I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they’re by contemporary, commercial American writers.
There are many Latino writers as talented as I am, but because we are published through small presses, our books don’t count. We are still the illegal aliens of the literary world.
Many writers are radical. I am not, because of my age and because of my terrible fear of demagogy.
If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn.
Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.
Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears.
Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.
Since I was there in the very beginning, I know the history of the characters. So, I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we’ve done that before.
I’m definitely one of those actresses who comes to a set knowing how I want to do a scene, and I definitely love input from my directors and my writers.
One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.
Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not.
You can’t learn to write in college. It’s a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do – and they don’t. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don’t want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who’s the bore of all time.
Writers are stewards of the culture. Publishers, librarians, bookstore owners. We’re all in this together. To write books that are gripping, important, that people want to have, is to keep publishing alive.
Writers now are putting total faith in designers at Apple and Amazon. It’s almost like a race-car driver having no input into how cars are designed.
I think one of the reasons musicians keep doing what they do and writers keep doing what they do, is that we’re totally unsuited for anything else. And I for one am much too lazy.
Other writers, producers, and directors of low-budget films would often put down the film they were making, saying it was just something to make money with. I never felt that. If I took the assignment, I’d give it my best shot.
Our writers are full of cliches just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one and had better be removed.
I’ve had very close relationships with some twentieth-century writers.
Trump did not spring out of nowhere, and I was struck by how prescient writers like Alexis de Tocqueville and George Orwell and Hannah Arendt were about how those in power get to define what the truth is.
I do read P.D. James because she pays much more attention to character, to a particular atmosphere or setting. But most mystery writers, I think, are controlled by the plot.
Writers don’t make good spouses. When I am writing, I’m not a good wife. I shut myself away, and all my emotions are directed towards what I’m trying to write.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
But a lot of writers – and I’m one of them – do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it’s a goad and does keep you alert and restless.
Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men’s stories about wars, business, power.
The writers I respect the most had an undying commitment to a vision.
Since then, I have just read and read – but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.
Many writers secretly long to be performers. You always get the ‘if you weren’t a writer’ question. I would be a back-up singer, to stand in the back and go like ‘do, do, do.’
It feels amazing to work with writers that write really well.
Originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another.
Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society.
It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.
The great thing about being a print journalist is that you are permitted to duck. Cameramen get killed while the writers are flat on the floor. A war correspondent for the BBC dedicated his memoir to 50 fallen colleagues, and I guarantee you they were all taking pictures. I am only alive because I am such a chicken.
Writers are a product of where we come from, but by looking at alternatives to the culture in which we live, we can find ways to change and hopefully improve it.
The writers want to know were you made your mistake, no how well your curve is breaking.
I think there are a lot more writers who are actors than you know; they just don’t have roles on famous TV shows that you recognize.
Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are.
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
Many writers tend to write summing-up books at the end of their lives.
The so-called feminist writers were disgusted with me. I did my thing, and so I guess by feminist standards I’m a feminist. That suits me fine.
The group of writers I had grown up with in the ’60s – Derek Mahon, Michael Longley, James Simmons, John Hewitt, Paul Muldoon – formed a very necessary and self-sustaining group.
I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that’s so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.
Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half.
Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread.
American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous.
I have no time to think about other writers. I am too busy with my own problems.
Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O’Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms.
I grew up reading the ‘Village Voice’ and wanting to be one of these multidisciplinary music writers, film writers, book writers. And I lucked out getting a job at the ‘Voice’ right after college.
I look for strong people. I don’t like people who’ll say yes to everything I might bring up. I want people who can argue and disagree and have a point of view that’s reflected in the magazine. My dad believed in the cult of personality. He brought great writers and columnists to ‘The Standard.’
Throughout African-American literature, the writer has, in a sense, been burdened by the necessity of pleading the case for the whole race. For example, writers of slave narratives tend to lose their individual voices, as they were expected to stand in for all other voices, which were absent.
In fact, I think for a lot of writers, it’s so hard to be read.
Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.
Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.
I do enjoy working with writers.
Working on a play is a vibrant and collaborative business. Everyone from the choreographer to the music director to the director to the writers work together toward the same goal, and everyone chimes in on everything.
Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand.
I’m not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I’ve never understood.
My advice for writers is to get a good day job. It takes the pressure off writing if you have a job that pays the bills.
I read poetry every day. I look at it as an exercise, a kind of T’ai Chi for writers. It teaches economy of form.
A’Lelia Walker did not subsidize specific writers, but she provided a place for all kinds of people to gather. She was one of the few blacks who had the money to allow her to entertain in the large scale.
Well, certainly I don’t think that there are very many good writers who don’t live without a sense of tension. If they haven’t got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.
Our principal writers have nearly all been fortunate in escaping regular education.
With comedy, I think it’s so important, especially in TV, to know and trust what the writers are writing and just have it down.
I don’t know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn’t hurt the book.
I don’t think that there are very many good writers who don’t live without a sense of tension. If they haven’t got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.
They’re fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
It’s also not unusual for writers to look backward. Because that’s your pool of resources.
But the French writers always had more originality and independence than others, and that regulator, which elsewhere was religion, long since ceased to exist for them.
Writers used to make such wonderful pictures without all that swearing, all that cursing. And now it seems that you can’t say three words without cursing. And I don’t think that’s right.
At ‘The Village Voice,’ there were all these fevers inside the offices, that would break out into full-scale rumbles between writers.
The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up.
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn’t matter. I’m not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn’t make us better, then what on earth is it for.
Writing headlines is a specialty – there are outstanding writers who will tell you they couldn’t write a headline to save their lives.
I know there are a lot of musicians and a lot of artists, and there are a lot of writers and other people who inspire young people, but I’d like to see somebody in political life be able to connect and make these choices that we need to make in Washington real in terms of people’s lives.
You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we’re doing it.
I love writers. All of my best friends are writers.
I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism.
One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people – directors, filmmakers, and writers – over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this.
In India, writers are underpaid. Universities should start new courses to create more opportunities for them.
I don’t have a normal job, so I really appreciate having friends who are writers and artists. It’s fun to have a group of people you can call in the middle of the day to go for a hike.
When I create a TV show, it’s so that I can write it. I’m not an empire builder; my writing staff is usually a combination of two kinds of people – experts in the world the show is set in, and young writers who will not be unhappy if they’re not writing scripts.
There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick.
As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.
They say great themes make great novels. but what these young writers don’t understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women.
Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.
In sheer genius Pascal ranks among the very greatest writers who have lived upon this earth. And his genius was not simply artistic; it displayed itself no less in his character and in the quality of his thought.
Writers obviously have to bear witness to the harsh face of the age.
Sometimes I listen to songs by very smart writers who assume that the world is a civil place with certain formalities that people follow, but I don’t see things that way. My own experience tells me that life is not like that.
Listen, here’s the thing about an English degree – if you sat somebody down and asked them to make a list of the writers they admire over the last hundred years, see how many of them got a degree in English.
To the extent that there is anything properly identifiable as dignity in our society today, our present writers of comedy would be inclined to treat it as a proper object of ridicule.
Before you approach a production entity or even a potential producer, you should write up a treatment and register your show with the Writers Guild of America.
I think my knowledge of music theory is rooted in jazz theory, and a lot of the writers of standards – Rodgers and Hart, and Gershwin.
I met a bunch of comic-book writers at the Metropolis convention and there was such an interesting discussion about the story of ‘Supergirl’ and trying to get it right. It can be a challenge, because you don’t want it to be the same as the Superman story.
Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.
As for goals, I don’t set myself those anymore. I’m not one of these ‘I must have achieved this and that by next year’ kind of writers. I take things as they come and find that patience and persistence tend to win out in the end.
My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own.
There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.
How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers.
Many artists and writers have used cannabis for creative stimulation – from the writers of the world’s religious masterpieces to our most irreverent satirists.
Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don’t think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.
I believe in hard work, not luck factor. The best efforts will reap the best fruits. Nobody can take all the credit. We don’t even talk about the efforts of the director, the writers, other technicians, etc. They all together take a film to another level.
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.
Most producers I’ve known were writers first, and writing is a vital part of any game show. You could easily argue that the writing is the key ingredient that makes ‘Jeopardy!’ so great.
One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.
All writers of the Chaldaean period associate monotheism in the closest way with unity of worship.
There were all us baby boomers who had a grammar school education, started to learn, then went on the pill, the whole thing, and so there are today a lot more women writers, editors, producers, and so a lot more women’s stories. God, the BBC’s practically run by women.
When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.
I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread.
Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together.
I remember Tim telling me that he had an idea for a musical and he said to me that he was hoping that ABBA would be writing the music, which I thought was a pretty wild idea because they were obviously known very much as pop writers.
Ninety-five percent of all writers who write do not get published, but 100 percent of all writers write because they have a voice in their head. The vast majority of writers simply write because they have to.
I’m one of those writers that have always worked on multiple things.
With ‘Darkly Dreaming Dexter,’ we as a group of writers had to take a rather thin novel and spread it out over the course of 12 episodes, and not only 12 episodes, but lay in story for everyone that’s going to take you through five years.
No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks.
I started in this racket in the early ’70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of.
I went through a big Kurt Vonnegut phase. But the writers who made me decide at a very early age that this is probably something I wanted to do were Stephen King and Douglas Adams, when I was probably, like, ten years old.
A lot of the time writers are just sponges… for what’s around them, and so books are helpful for focusing your mind and literally putting it into words.
It’s been a great place to get in touch with what people are really thinking. And to make contact with readers and other writers. Egalitarian, wide open, like the Wild West!
Our great American writers were all newspaper people.
I feel as if I’m clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously – and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.
The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.
Most writers can write, most rock ‘n rollers cannot.
I believe strongly in writing groups such as Romance Writers Of America that offer support, information and networking.
Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers.
I think I’m part of a generation of crime writers all of whom woke up independently and recoiled with horror at the fact that we’d chosen this very conservative genre.
There are two classes of women in Soviet Russia. There is the professional class, which has taken the place of the nobility and includes government officials, artists, doctors, composers and writers as well as former members of the old nobility whose sympathy is with the Soviets, and also the peasant class.
Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.
The letters were universally complimentary, and we designers loved hearing that our games were being enjoyed, but if they weren’t sending us a picture of their screens most of those writers would have spent their time playing the game rather than writing letters.
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the ‘ideas’ with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
You fall into a black hole, and you are irretrievably gone from the universe. That finality has made it irresistible to writers.
It’s one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
I am well aware that the writers of New York, London, and Toronto are more readily noticed, though the shadowy and potent Ozarks Literary Cabal does what it can for me, then nightly joins me for dinner and calls me ‘honey.’
Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be.
I was always writing the books that I wanted to write, books that demanded to be written at the time. But, like most writers, you start off feeling your way.
Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.
I don’t like political poetry, and I don’t write it. If this question was pointing towards that, I think it is missing the point of the American tradition, which is always apolitical, even when the poetry comes out of politically active writers.
If you are a serious writer or just a normal one, in one way or another, you are writing in the service of freedom. All writers know, understand, or dream that their work will be in the service of freedom.
I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.
Memories, impressions and emotions from the first 20 years on earth are most writers’ main material; little that comes afterward is quite so rich and resonant.
I was a pretty good fighter. But it was the writers who made me great.
One of the things that I tell beginning writers is this: If you describe a landscape, or a cityscape, or a seascape, always be sure to put a human figure somewhere in the scene. Why? Because readers are human beings, mostly interested in human beings. People are humanists. Most of them are humanists, that is.
I just felt drawn towards the kind of music that really needed a strong female presence female writers, female producers, female figures and that just kind of unfolded on its own.
Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.
I don’t think it’s going to be possible for the next generation of writers to tell stories without telling stories about telling stories.
I didn’t know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.
Recipe writers hate to write about heat. They despise it. Because there aren’t proper words for communicating what should be done with it.
As is said about most writers, on the one hand, all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my upbringing. On the other hand, the more I read, the more I felt this well-known fissure between me and the world.
The writers who reject tendentiousness and purpose in their work are the very ones who display it in every word they write. I could draw countless examples from the history of literature to show that the more a writer clamours for spiritual freedom, the more tendentious his work is liable to be.
It’s not easy to tell a story about writers and make that feel like a complete story and an interesting story.
I think Paris smells not just sweet but melancholy and curious, sometimes sad but always enticing and seductive. She’s a city for the all senses, for artists and writers and musicians and dreamers, for fantasies, for long walks and wine and lovers and, yes, for mysteries.
Artists – musicians, painters, writers, poets – always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life.
It’s always a mistake for writers to key their submissions to world events, because they move so quickly and unpredictably, as has certainly proven the case in Afghanistan.
I have Graham Greene’s telephone number, but I wouldn’t dream of using it. I don’t seek out writers because we all want to be alone.
People don’t want to listen to a celebrity tweeting about their charities and shows. That’s why comedy writers do well – we put out little funny ideas.
I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.
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.
Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition.
People in rock had this idea that rappers aren’t talented. In my opinion we’re better writers, we think deeper, and our concepts are harder – Rap evolves faster than any other genre.
Directors and writers have a lot of stress as well, because they have people they answer to.
It’s also that comedians don’t have the kind of narcissism that actors have. They’re writers who perform their own material. It’s more interesting. And they’re sexy because they risk more. Stand-up comedians risk more than anyone.
Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.
It’s very important that we give a voice to the voiceless in terms of media; because media is a global phenom and it portrays you dependent upon what controls you have and the writers are doing great work.
I just have a thing for writers. Maybe it because I’m just so not a writer.
Well, there are more writers of blogs right now than there are readers, so that’s clearly a vanity phenomenon.
I never thought what I wrote was good enough to be published. I thought of myself as completely detached from that constellation of real writers. It was completely for myself.
I think one of the coolest things about the job is the level of trust we have for each other. The actors fully trust that the writers will write amazing episodes, and the writers trust that the actors will follow their instincts with the characters.
Most comic scriptwriters are very bad. The artists are good, but the writers are so bad.
I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it’s a poem, it’s almost written in my head somewhere.
Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers.
I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.
This is how many people become artists, musicians, writers, computer programmers, record-holding athletes, scientists… by spending time alone practicing what they love.
John Steinbeck is one of the most under-discussed and under-written-about of all American writers. He is way up there and should stand on a par, or even above, Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner.
Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don’t listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
I think that most writers who wait until they’re inspired to write are just waiting for the fear to subside.
My father, George, has also affected the choices in my life regarding films. I like films that take chances or say something different or experiment. Growing up with him, I was surrounded by different artists – not just actors or film-makers but cartoonists, poets, writers.
I’ve probably had my day in the sun. I think I’ve influenced a lot of comic book writers.
Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.
Mystery writers’ conventions are usually good, and this one has been excellent and extremely well prepared and thought out in advance. A lot of people have given their time and their skill, and a good deal of wit, and Anchorage has made us extraordinarily welcome.
Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.
Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.
Most political journalists come to Washington because they’re snappy writers, big thinkers, or news breakers. Me? My ticket to the big leagues had little to do with talent. It was mostly about the governor I was covering, Bill Clinton.
I’m transitioning to television and film, but ultimately, I want to have a stronger presence on the web and be able to curate the content that I want to see. To bring attention to other filmmakers and writers.
I was notified on July 17 to be ready to start August 7 for an October air date. When we reached the screen we did not have a single segment ready. It was done so fast the writers never got a chance to know what it was all about.
Nothing spooky or terrible happened on set, but we were told to say it had. We were giving a press conference and the writers were going on about these terrible things that supposedly happened while we were filming.
I thought ‘Borat’ was a breakthrough comedy, because it was really funny. It wasn’t some studio-produced script with 14 writers.
Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start.
Don’t write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.
There’s a lot of Latinos right now, a lot of filmmakers and writers that are Latin too.
With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born writers, some people achieve it after a lot of hard work, some people have a writing career thrust upon them. I am in that last group.
I have never been an ambitious person, and my participation in this industry is a fluke, but only male writers can afford to be coy and self-deprecating.
The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.
My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.
There are a number of writers who believe it is their duty to throw as many curve balls at the reader as possible. To twist and twist again. These are the Chubby Checkers of crime fiction and, while I admire the craft, I think that it can actually work against genuine suspense.
The problem was the journalists who also did not understand much of my music, but they wrote about it. I think you fell into the usual trap laid out by parts of the press and other writers: that the poor musician has always to fight the evil companies and managers.
In many senses, ‘Borgen’ was a very democratic show. I was always invited to hear the writers’ thoughts for the next episodes and allowed to comment on them.
It’s well known that actors are lousy writers.
I met Robert Crumb in 1962; he lived in Cleveland for a while. I took a look at his stuff. Crumb was doing stuff beyond what other writers and artists were doing. It was a step beyond Mad.
When you have a foreign invasion – in this case by the Indonesian army – writers, intellectuals, newspapers and magazines are the first targets of repression.
Writers let themselves be enticed by the language.
Here I am paying big money to you writers and what for? All you do is change the words.
I’ve seen enough successful writers who no longer seem to care when they are recognized with an award, and I think that’s just tragic.
Yet, it ought to be obvious that good music generally occupies a higher plane that mere politics. Great writers can express moods through melody and capture experiences we share most powerfully – love, lust, longing; joy, rage, fear; triumph, yearning and confusion.
The vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books, and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out at all. And then it comes out, and two reviews are published, and it sells 12 copies.
There are too many good comic book writers out there. I’d rather remain a fanboy.
If most writers are honest with themselves, this is the difference they want to make: before, they were not noticed; now they are.
I read everything aloud, novels as well as picture books. I believe the eye and ear are different listeners. So as writers, we have to please both.
I think more talented writers should get involved in the industry, yes, of course. But that doesn’t presuppose that those writers have to be novelists or screenwriters.
I still feel the impulse to give young writers a hearing, and I believe I have played more unpublished compositions than any other band leader in the country.
I’ve heard from writers and musicians and fans that they think I’m underrated.
So when I got the chance to do my first talk show, 50 years ago last month, I never had any writers. There was no budget – it was just me and the camera and my friend who was the director. I talked about what I’d done that week.
My favorite writers are all Jews – David, Solomon, Matthew, Mark – well, you get the picture.
