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.
