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.
