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.
