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.
