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.
