Why, for example, do the great writers use anticipation instead of surprise? Because surprise is merely an instrument of the unusual, whereas anticipation of a consequence enlarges our understanding of what is happening.
Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That’s why so many of them are in jail.
I think a lot of studios today are run by women, and we are entering a time when a lot of women have evolved in Second City and Upright Citizens Brigade and wanted to become writers and comedians.
At the same time, I think books create a sort of network in the reader’s mind, with one book reinforcing another. Some books form relationships. Other books stand in opposition. No two writers or readers have the same pattern of interaction.
We are suffocated by writers who want to enlighten us with their truths. For me, the theatre is beautiful because it is a secret, and secrets seduce us, we all want to share secrets.
Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.
Get more women producers, writers, directors. Why should we expect men to do it for us? They can’t.
The first year we actually did a lot of night shooting and the writers weren’t even allowed on location.
So when it was my turn to start developing projects, I knew the writers I wanted to work with, and I had met every head of studio, every executive and a lot of producers. I started finding things, little crumbs off other people’s tables that I would make my own.
If writers just sit and talk about oppression, they are not going to do much writing.
It was only after five years in the army, when I was having to do a very boring job in a very boring place, that I thought: ‘Why not try writing a novel?’ partly out of youthful arrogance and partly because there had been a long line of writers in my mother’s family.
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It’s elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.
I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don’t think your work is quite as universal.
I don’t find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it’s a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together.
It is not easy to get parts in mainstream films for most people of color. Hollywood and British writers are not writing parts for us, or the directors are not interested in casting us in parts that are color-blind.
There’s something with the physical size of America… American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don’t come together in real groups.
I have a lot of respect for people who are great at ad-libbing and for writers and directors who are able to create a scene in which that works. Judd Apatow is fantastic at it. But as an audience member, I like the sound of something that’s been written – I like it to sound written.
You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it’s like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.
As you know from reading many of these Negro writers, we don’t deal too much with the discussion of democracy and what it means and how improvisation fits in all that.
It’s a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done.
I do not write by any set time schedule. I realize there are many writers who follow a daily regime where they arise at 6:00 a.m., do some sort of exercise, eat breakfast and then sit down and produce words for a three to four hour period.
I got dumped off ‘The Iron Lady’ a month before they started shooting, and then they brought two new writers on. Then I was brought back on again. I’m just a bit of a rubber ball. I just bounce back.
Reading and writing, like everything else, improve with practice. And, of course, if there are no young readers and writers, there will shortly be no older ones. Literacy will be dead, and democracy – which many believe goes hand in hand with it – will be dead as well.
The classical writers… playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.
This homage has been rendered not to me – for the Polish soil is fertile and does not lack better writers than me – but to the Polish achievement, the Polish genius.
In pure literature, the writers of the eighteenth century achieved, indeed, many triumphs; but their great, their peculiar, triumphs were in the domain of thought.
I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.
I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.
We sat around on a hotel balcony with a bottle of wine and tried to figure out how you would go about blowing up a planet. That’s the kind of conversations science fiction writers have when they get together. We don’t talk about football or anything like that.
I’m interested in how artists and writers do this, using art as therapy. Escaping into the worlds we create. We’re all victims and few of us are truly free.
I grew up with an artist father, and my parents’ friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.
An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.
I think it must be very hard to be one of the new young writers who are urged to put themselves forward when it may be the last thing on earth they’d be good at.
Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis Thomas, who is no longer alive but is just heroic to me.
Foreign writers – especially Germans – often feel that Shakespeare is really one of them, that he was somehow accidentally born in the wrong country. In much the same way, leftists sense in their bones that he was a radical, rightists that he was a Tory.
I’d never really done comedy before ‘Community,’ so getting to work day in and day out with all these great people, directors, writers, and actors, I feel like I’ve learned a lot.
Those writers that have zero say in their movie adaptations have zero say because they sell it. If you don’t sell it, and you do it yourself, and you wait until the screenplay is ready, you don’t have to worry about that.
Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers.
I’d like to encourage people to please keep reading-and most importantly, to please keep trying new writers. The only way we can bring fresh new material into the field is if people go out and buy it.
The humor is essentially dark for a cartoon and sophisticated. But at the same time, being a cartoon gives the writers more freedom than in a normal sitcom. It always pushes the line that, despite human failings, the Simpsons are really decent people.
I think writers are prone to hyperbole sometimes.
Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn’t fiction at all.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
Writers collect stories of rituals: John Cheever putting on a jacket and tie to go down to the basement, where he kept a desk near the boiler room. Keats buttoning up his clean white shirt to write in, after work.
What I take from writers I like is their economy – the ability to use language to very effective ends.
Many comedians and comedy writers have shared the childhood experience of learning to joke to protect themselves from neighborhood bullies when challenge or physical defense were not among the sensible options.
I believe that stories find writers, writers don’t find stories. With the ‘Pendragon’ series, I actually had multiple story ideas and decided that instead of writing them individually, I would create a character whose journey would thread them all together.
Writers are completely out of touch with reality.
I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.
Sometimes you have a period piece where you have to research around it but, if the writers have done their homework well enough, the information is all in the script.
