Quotes and Sayings about Writer
"No one uses a ribbon typewriter any more, but your final draft is not the time to try to wring a few more sheets out of your inkjet cartridge."
- Lynn Abbey
(Related: Time, Draft)
"I do have a small collection of traditional SF ideas which I've never been able to sell. I'm known as a fantasy writer and neither my agent nor my editors want to risk my brand by jumping genre."
- Lynn Abbey
(Related: Ideas, Editors, Fantasy, Risk, Want, Writer)
"A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story."
- Lynn Abbey
(Related: Instinct, Writer)
"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."
- Lynn Abbey
(Related: God, Books, Free will, Sense, Surprises, Writers, Writing)
"I'm a writer first and an editor second... or maybe third or even fourth. Successful editing requires a very specific set of skills, and I don't claim to have all of them at my command."
- Lynn Abbey
(Related: Successful, First, Writer)
"I'm not constrained by being a genre writer. Any story I can imagine, I can cast as a fantasy novel and probably get it published."
- Lynn Abbey
(Related: Being, Fantasy, Writer)
"The career of a writer is comparable to that of a woman of easy virtue. You write first for pleasure, later for the pleasure of others and finally for money."
- Marcel Achard
(Related: Money, Virtue, Career, First, Pleasure, Woman, Writer)
"A memorandum is written not to inform the reader but to protect the writer."
- Dean Acheson
(Related: Writer)
"I understand that postmodern literature probably means people like DeLillo, The Fiction Collective, but I don't get it that those writers are really influenced by postmodern theorists."
- Kathy Acker
(Related: People, Fiction, Literature, Writers)
"How I work is I work from of very character-driven place. And I trust the writers."
- Amy Adams
(Related: Trust, Work, Character, Writers)
"A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation."
- Joseph Addison
(Related: Observation, World, Worth, Writer)
"If you desire information on some point of law, you are not likely to ponder over the ponderous tomes of legal writers in order to obtain the knowledge you seek, by your own unaided efforts."
- Felix Adler
(Related: Legal, Knowledge, Desire, Information, Law, Order, Writers)
"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."
- Jenny Agutter
(Related: Doubt, Patience, Respect, Writer, Writers)
"Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite."
- Edward Albee
(Related: Truth, Fact, Reality, Will, Writer, Writers)
"I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity."
- Brian Aldiss
(Related: Being, Identity, Writer)
"It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one's own creativity - that's a much tougher matter."
- Brian Aldiss
(Related: Work, Creativity, Writer)
"Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores."
- Bill Alexander
(Related: Force, Intellectuals, Poets, Spain, Workers, Writers)
"If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn."
- Lloyd Alexander
(Related: Books, May, Writers)
"All that writers can do is keep trying to say what is deepest in their hearts."
- Lloyd Alexander
(Related: Trying, Writers)
"The hard necessity of bringing the judge on the bench down into the dock has been the peculiar responsibility of the writer in all ages of man."
- Nelson Algren
(Related: Man, Necessity, Responsibility, Writer)
"The mercury rule writers also ignored mercury's special qualities."
- Tom Allen
(Related: Mercury, Writers)
"I mean being a writer is like being a psychoanalyst, but you don't get any patients."
- Al Alvarez
(Related: Being, Writer)
"There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors."
- Stephen Ambrose
(Related: Editors, Want, Writers)
"The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major."
- Stephen Ambrose
(Related: Successful, Being, English, Writer)
"Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal."
- Martin Amis
(Related: Life, Sense, Will, Writer)
"My dad is a bank president and my mom was an accountant and they didn't think that seeking the life of a freelance writer was very practical, you see. Of course, I was just as determined to do it."
- Kevin J. Anderson
(Related: Dad, Life, Mom, President, Writer)
"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."
- Kevin J. Anderson
(Related: Science, Fiction, Football, Talk, Wine, Writers)
"I did several interesting jobs, working in restaurants, I worked at a lab rat farm, feeding and watering all these rats. Then I got a full-time job as a technical writer for a large scientific research laboratory."
- Kevin J. Anderson
(Related: Job, Jobs, Research, Restaurants, Writer)
"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."
- Laurie Anderson
(Related: Art, Thinking, Want, Writers)
"It is rarely that you see an American writer who is not hopelessly sane."
- Margaret Anderson
(Related: American, Writer)
"I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it."
- Roger Angell
(Related: Death, Thought, Baseball, Press, Talk, Want, Writer)
"Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon."
- Maya Angelou
(Related: Heart, Being, Right, Will, Writer)
"Princess Rose should indeed be a TV movie, assuming something doesn't go wrong. I don't know how good a movie it will be, because the way movie folk think is different from the way writers think, and I distrust what isn't done my way. This is what I call a healthy paranoia."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: Distrust, Folk, Paranoia, Will, Writers, Wrong)
"I maintain an ongoing survey of Internet Publishing and self publishing, so that it is now possible for any writer with a book to get it published at nominal cost or free, and to have it on sale at booksellers like Amazon.com."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: Internet, Now, Publishing, Self, Writer)
"One reason I don't suffer Writer's Block is that I don't wait on the muse, I summon it at need."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: Reason, Writer)
"I hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it's all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along."
- Piers Anthony
(Related: Hope, Being, EnglFantasy, Light, Obvious, Trouble, Waiting, Writers)
"The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation."
- Aharon Appelfeld
(Related: Civilization, Individuality, Voice, Writer)
"I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write."
- Mary Archer
(Related: Time, Prison, Will, Writer)
"Every writer, to some extent, writes about himself."
- Dario Argento
(Related: Writer)
"I don't want to live in an ivory tower, being the songwriter who just turns inward."
- Billie Joe Armstrong
(Related: Being, Want)
"All the writers and producers around us that gave us the environment where we could play. They were able to provide us with a place where we could take chances to play with things, go against the grain and do things that people don't always do."
- Matthew Ashford
(Related: People, Environment, Play, Writers)
"From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review."
- Isaac Asimov
(Related: Observation, Writers)
"Science fiction writers foresee the inevitable, and although problems and catastrophes may be inevitable, solutions are not."
- Isaac Asimov
(Related: Science, Catastrophes, Fiction, May, Problems, Writers)
"You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer."
- Margaret Atwood
(Related: Writer)
"Fame often makes a writer vain, but seldom makes him proud."
- W. H. Auden
(Related: Fame, Writer)
"Some writers confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about."
- W. H. Auden
(Related: Originality, Writers)
"In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them."
- W. H. Auden
(Related: May, Writer)
"I can't tell you any more than any other writer can tell you why they write, and I don't know what my influences are."
- Jean M. Auel
(Related: Writer)
"I don't know if she should worry too much, I mean some of our greatest writers have had movies made of their books, lots of Hemingway novels were turned into movies, it doesn't hurt the book."
- Paul Auster
(Related: Movies, Books, Hurt, Worry, Writers)
"The challenging thing is that we go home after doing the run-through and the writers stay there working, so sometimes I get script changes delivered to me at midnight. It's constantly shifting."
- Jillian Bach
(Related: Home, Midnight, Writers)
"A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit."
- Richard Bach
(Related: Writer)
"Literary imagination is an aesthetic object offered by a writer to a lover of books."
- Gaston Bachelard
(Related: Imagination, Books, Literary, Writer)
"I've made three studio albums and one live one with my brother. It's melodic singer-songwriter acoustic-rock music."
- Kevin Bacon
(Related: Music, Brother)
"What makes me furious, not just because we're in an interview, but I don't like when writers take your words and put them somewhere else, in the wrong context in their own article about you."
- Erykah Badu
(Related: Words, Writers, Wrong)
"Writers like teeth are divided into incisors and grinders."
- Walter Bagehot
(Related: Writers)
"Blanche is written with a terrible authority, the authority that comes from artistic necessity when the writer is compelled to write by his demon, rather than by his agent or promoter."
- Paul Bailey
(Related: Authority, Necessity, Writer)
"For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo."
- Nicholson Baker
(Related: Control, Beginning, Living, World, Writers)
"The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any."
- Russell Baker
(Related: Work, Suspicion, Writer, Writing)
"Live action writers will give you a structure, but who the hell is talking about structure? Animation is closer to jazz than some kind of classical stage structure."
- Ralph Bakshi
(Related: Action, Animation, Hell, Jazz, Talking, Will, Writers)
"My dad was the baby. When he was born they were already successful. They sent him to business school - he probably would have loved to have been a poet or a writer or something, and he was very creative."
- Bob Balaban
(Related: Business, Dad, Successful, Baby, School, Writer)
"The writer's greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all."
- James A. Baldwin
(Related: Time, Greed, Needs, Sense, Want, Writer)
"Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent."
- James A. Baldwin
(Related: Talent, Nothing, World, Writer)
"I want to be an honest man and a good writer."
- James A. Baldwin
(Related: Man, Want, Writer)
"The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him."
- James Baldwin
(Related: Experience, People, Responsibility, Writer)
"I only sound intelligent when there's a good script writer around."
- Christian Bale
(Related: Sound, Writer)
"Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there."
- J. G. Ballard
(Related: Fiction, Reality, Writer)
"The job of the writer is to make revolution irresistible."
- Toni Cade Bambara
(Related: Revolution, Job, Writer)
"As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book."
- Iain Banks
(Related: People, Film, Writer)
"As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of."
- Iain Banks
(Related: Time, Thought, Play, Writer)
"The best thing about writing programs is that it rationalized the apprenticeship of a writer."
- Russell Banks
(Related: Writer, Writing)
"And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care."
- Russell Banks
(Related: Love, People, Care, Want, Writers)
"For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant."
- Russell Banks
(Related: Work, Living, Writer, Writers)
"I want to be a writer someday."
- Andrea Barber
(Related: Want, Writer)
"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."
- Howard Barker
(Related: Secrets, Theatre, Want, Writers)
"Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales."
- John Perry Barlow
(Related: Performance, Living, Musicians, Sales, Writers)
"But he knew people and he was head writer for Have Gun Will Travel, and if you took those early Star Treks that we did and put us in a western wardrobe and put us on wagon train going west, we can say the same lines."
- Majel Barrett
(Related: Travel, People, Will, Writer)
"A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate."
- John Barton
(Related: Literary, Writer)
"The danger that may really threaten (crime fiction) is that soon there will be more writers than readers."
- Jacques Barzun
(Related: Danger, May, Will, Writers)
"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."
- Charles Baudelaire
(Related: Poetry, Fact, France, Horror, Will, Writers)
"It must inquire not merely about the circumstances of the time in general, but in particular about the writer's position with regard to these things, the interests and motives, the leading ideas of his literary activity."
- Ferdinand Christian Baur
(Related: Time, Ideas, Circumstances, Leading, Literary, Motives, Writer)
"Oftentimes what happens is that the writer understands one character, but they don't understand the other one, and the other one ends up not being written as well."
- Jennifer Beals
(Related: Character, Being, Writer)
"It's been a great place to get in touch with what people are really thinking. And to make contact with readers and other writers. Egalitarian, wide open, like the Wild West!"
- Greg Bear
(Related: People, Open, Thinking, Writers)
"No language is rude that can boast polite writers."
- Aubrey Beardsley
(Related: Language, Writers)
"I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works."
- Ann Beattie
(Related: Writers)
"Nobody can assume that, to a writer, everything is off-limits."
- Ann Beattie
(Related: Writer)
"While I would agree that I write about serious subjects, and that they're not necessarily the most pleasant subjects or even the most pleasant people, as a writer I just think about the humorous aspects of these things - that's what keeps me going when I'm writing a story."
- Ann Beattie
(Related: People, Writer, Writing)
"It's often been said that I'm an extremely depressing, cynical writer. I've never known what to make of that."
- Ann Beattie
(Related: Writer)
"I want to see the writers strike because the writers, god bless them, are the only true commies we have in Hollywood."
- Ned Beatty
(Related: God, Hollywood, Want, Writers)
"The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels."
- Simone de Beauvoir
(Related: Novelty, Originality, Writer)
"I wear a lot of different hats - from writer to producer and artist. We all do 5 or 6 jobs, everything from creating our own graphic design to actually recording and the whole bit."
- William Bell
(Related: Design, Artist, Jobs, Writer)
"All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac."
- Saul Bellow
(Related: Woman, Writer)
"I read very widely, both non-fiction and fiction, so I don't think there's a single writer who influences me."
- Peter Benchley
(Related: Fiction, Writer)
"The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon."
- Robert Benchley
(Related: Necessity, Writing)
"The freelance writer is a man who is paid per piece or per word or perhaps."
- Robert Benchley
(Related: Man, Word, Writer)
"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."
- Walter Benjamin
(Related: People, Books, Poor, Writers, Writing)
"Oh, well, in Los Angeles everybody is an actor, or a producer, or a writer, or a director, or an agent, or... So everybody understands the hours."
- Julie Benz
(Related: Actor, Writer)
"When I look back at it, I'm mostly amazed at how poorly it was shot. David Kelley is a great writer, and I thought the scripts were great, but it just looks so cheap."
- Peter Berg
(Related: Thought, Writer)
"Why do writers write? Because it isn't there."
- Thomas Berger
(Related: Writers)
"It is insight into human nature that is the key to the communicator's skill. For whereas the writer is concerned with what he puts into his writings, the communicator is concerned with what the reader gets out of it. He therefore becomes a student of how people read or listen."
- William Bernbach
(Related: Nature, People, Human nature, Key, Skill, Writer)
"That is a secondary teacher conception - the writer as an observer."
- Peter Bichsel
(Related: Writer)
"I wanted to write a novel. At 12 I knew, I am a writer. I said it to nobody."
- Peter Bichsel
(Related: Writer)
"Why does one always ask a writer why they stopped? I am sure everyone finds in any drawer a few dear poems."
- Peter Bichsel
(Related: Poems, Writer)
"Writers let themselves be enticed by the language."
- Peter Bichsel
(Related: Language, Writers)
"About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment."
- Josh Billings
(Related: Hope, Judgment, Originality, Writer)
"I was very pleased, obviously, to have outsold such great writers. But I'm not insane - I do realize that I am a popular writer who people buy to take on vacation."
- Maeve Binchy
(Related: People, Popular, Vacation, Writer, Writers)
"I'm an escapist kind of writer."
- Maeve Binchy
(Related: Writer)
"A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender."
- Jim Bishop
(Related: Writer)
"It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him."
- Jim Bishop
(Related: Mother, Father, Pleasure, Writer)
"I love being a very personal singer-songwriter, but I also like being a scientist or explorer."
- Bjork
(Related: Love, Being)
"Bob Dylan is quite a songwriter, and a great singer and musician. I won't bother with comparing myself to him, but I will say that I heard his records at a very young age and I still listen to all his records."
- Frank Black
(Related: Age, Will)
"You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual. Most of them are mangled and even have made up stuff in them, that is to say, made up stuff by the writer or editor."
- Frank Black
(Related: Being, Musicians, Writer)
"I'd hate to be a songwriter starting a career today."
- Otis Blackwell
(Related: Career, Hate, Today)
"I got behind that pencil and nothing happened for many years, but since they put me in the Songwriters Hall of Fame, I've turned around. I took a good look at myself and said, I think it's time to get back at work."
- Otis Blackwell
(Related: Time, Work, Fame, Nothing, Years)
"I like this town, it's really great. They've put me in The Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame. This town is about music. It's about the kind of music I like."
- Otis Blackwell
(Related: Music, Fame)
"A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it."
- Maurice Blanchot
(Related: Work, Writer)
"Directors and writers have a lot of stress as well, because they have people they answer to."
- Alexis Bledel
(Related: People, Stress, Writers)
"In spite of advances in technology and changes in the economy, state government still operates on an obsolete 1970s model. We have a typewriter government in an Internet age."
- Matt Blunt
(Related: Age, Government, Technology, Economy, Internet, State)
"Being a good television screenwriter requires an understanding of the way film accelerates the communication of words."
- Steven Bochco
(Related: Being, Communication, Film, Television, Understanding, Words)
"What is qualified? What have I been qualified for in my life? I haven't been qualified to be a mayor. I'm not qualified to be a songwriter. I'm not qualified to be a TV producer. I'm not qualified to be a successful businessman. And so, I don't know what qualified means."
- Sonny Bono
(Related: Life, Successful)
"The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future."
- Jorge Luis Borges
(Related: Work, Fact, Future, Past, Writers)
"Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned."
- Jorge Luis Borges
(Related: Measure, Writers)
"Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers."
- Alain de Botton
(Related: Writers)
"In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well."
- Alain de Botton
(Related: Work, Competition, Day, Envy, Fool, Problems, Writer)
"I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work."
- Alain de Botton
(Related: Work, Attention, Trying, Writers, Writing)
"Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind."
- Catherine Drinker Bowen
(Related: Living, Reality, Writer, Writing)
"For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word."
- Catherine Drinker Bowen
(Related: Healing, Nothing, Right, Word, Writer)
"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."
- Catherine Drinker Bowen
(Related: Change, Friends, Mistakes, Self, Trouble, Writers)
"The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written."
- Elizabeth Bowen
(Related: First, Importance, Value, Writer, Writing)
"Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again."
- Bruce Boxleitner
(Related: Ideas, Draft, First, Writer)
"I don't call myself a writer."
- Bruce Boxleitner
(Related: Writer)
"A storyteller is basically what actors and writers are."
- Bruce Boxleitner
(Related: Actors, Writers)
"So I had a ghostwriter, they call them, or somebody who is an experienced writer, to help. I've got the ideas in my head, it's getting them properly on paper."
- Bruce Boxleitner
(Related: Ideas, Help, Writer)
"There are quite a few honest songwriters out there writing about relationships and their own personality traits. But for some reason, once they step out of the bedroom, their honesty doesn't seem to come with them."
- Billy Bragg
(Related: Honesty, Personality, Reason, Relationships, Writing)
"My theory is this; I'm not a political songwriter. I'm an honest songwriter."
- Billy Bragg
(Related: Theory)
"Being a writer in a library is rather like being a eunuch in a harem."
- John Braine
(Related: Being, Writer)
"To the present writer a careful study of the facts now available seems to leave no doubt that civilization was born at the southeast corner of the Mediterranean."
- James H. Breasted
(Related: Civilization, Doubt, Facts, Now, Present, Study, Writer)
"Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter."
- Gerald Brenan
(Related: Writer)
"In fact, I think for a lot of writers, it's so hard to be read."
- Susie Bright
(Related: Fact, Writers)
"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."
- Susie Bright
(Related: Experience, People, Books, Pleasure, Reading, Want, Writers)
"My dad told me that no one could ever make it as a writer, that my chances were equivalent to winning the lottery - which was good for me, because I like to have something to prove."
- Poppy Z. Brite
(Related: Dad, Winning, Writer)
"In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn't read the one until after I'd written the other."
- Poppy Z. Brite
(Related: France, Influence, Road, Writer)
"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."
- Poppy Z. Brite
(Related: Movies, Effect, Fiction, Film, Hollywood, Horror, Writers)
"I certainly don't think I would have been asked to pose for Rage if I wasn't a known writer."
- Poppy Z. Brite
(Related: Writer)
"If you like to read, sometimes it's interesting just to go and see what the reality is, of the word, of the seedy or not so seedy fiction writer, the drunk or sober poet... Sometimes you can go looking for illumination."
- Harold Brodkey
(Related: Fiction, Reality, Word, Writer)
"For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language."
- Joseph Brodsky
(Related: Patriotism, Attitude, Language, Writer)
"David Brinkley was an icon of modern broadcast journalism, a brilliant writer who could say in a few words what the country needed to hear during times of crisis, tragedy and triumph."
- Tom Brokaw
(Related: Country, Crisis, Journalism, Tragedy, Words, Writer)
"Great writers are the saints for the godless."
- Anita Brookner
(Related: Saints, Writers)
"A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers."
- Gwendolyn Brooks
(Related: Education, School, Writer, Writers)
"I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker."
- Gwendolyn Brooks
(Related: Writer)
"Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him."
- Mel Brooks
(Related: Talent, People, Ability, Being, Living, Names, Skin, Writer)
"Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers."
- Mel Brooks
(Related: Writers)
"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."
- Terry Brooks
(Related: Adventure, Name, Writers)
"I might add that you change as a person as you grow older, so you change as a writer, too."
- Terry Brooks
(Related: Change, Writer)
"For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time."
- Terry Brooks
(Related: Time, World, Writer)
"Recipe writers hate to write about heat. They despise it. Because there aren't proper words for communicating what should be done with it."
- Alton Brown
(Related: Hate, Words, Writers)
"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."
- Eric Brown
(Related: Friends, Interest, Writers)
"'Made it as a writer'? I'm still wondering if I've made it as a writer. I've made it as a published writer of the type of SF that I want to write and read, but I'm still waiting for that big breakthrough."
- Eric Brown
(Related: Waiting, Want, Writer)
"Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days."
- Eric Brown
(Related: Thought, Writer)
"I think my fascination is less with genre figures than with writers in general."
- Eric Brown
(Related: Writers)
"I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story."
- Eric Brown
(Related: Duty, Emotions, Writer, Writing)
"Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing."
- Louise Brown
(Related: Want, Will, Writers)
"Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I'll go a step further. You must be bisexual."
- Rita Mae Brown
(Related: Writers)
"Writers will happen in the best of families."
- Rita Mae Brown
(Related: Will, Writers)
"I am a comic writer, which means I get to slay the dragons, and shoot the bull."
- Rita Mae Brown
(Related: Writer)
"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."
- Anatole Broyard
(Related: Love, American, Literature, Nostalgia, Paradoxes, Writers)
"To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding."
- Anatole Broyard
(Related: Peace, Possibility, Punishment, Writer)
"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."
- Anatole Broyard
(Related: Work, People, Idea, Friends, Job, Talk, Writers)
"All literature consists of whatever the writer thinks is cool. The reader will like the book to the degree that he agrees with the writer about what's cool."
- Steven Brust
(Related: Literature, Will, Writer)
"I wanted to be a director and producer and writer, but in the early '40's the union wouldn't let you get through the gates. You couldn't get on a crew, or even learn to direct."
- Larry Buchanan
(Related: Writer)
"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."
- Charles Buck
(Related: Day, Name, Sabbath, Writers)
"In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write."
- Pearl S. Buck
(Related: Faith, Work, Hope, Lies, Pen, Waiting, Writer)
"The stores and the things like that, the business side of things came out at the point when, I'd say probably in the early '70s, it looked like the year of the singer-songwriter was over, 'cause music changed in our time and the spotlight was out."
- Jimmy Buffett
(Related: Business, Music, Time)
"You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down."
- Jimmy Buffett
(Related: Will, Writer)
"And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them."
- Jimmy Buffett
(Related: Writer)
"I view myself primarily as a trial lawyer who happens to be writing, as opposed to a writer who happens to be a trial lawyer, so the audience is like a jury to me."
- Vincent Bugliosi
(Related: Jury, Writer, Writing)
"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."
- James Lee Burke
(Related: Home, Success, Literary, Today, Words, Writers)
"I didn't need to borrow money from the record company, because if I had my own publishing company, and I had my own writers, I'd have enough to get and do whatever I wanted to do."
- Solomon Burke
(Related: Money, Company, Publishing, Writers)
"I have learned to respect ideas, wherever they come from. Often they come from clients. Account executives often have big creative ideas, regardless of what some writers think."
- Leo Burnett
(Related: Ideas, Clients, Respect, Writers)
"Everything around a writer, or musician in the record business, probably everything in all the United States or in all of western civilization, is about competition."
- T-Bone Burnett
(Related: Business, Civilization, Competition, states, United, Writer)
"As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward."
- Augusten Burroughs
(Related: Being, Giving, Luxury, Writer)
"I think writers tend to be experience junkies, and I think they also tend to want to be on the outside looking in."
- Augusten Burroughs
(Related: Experience, Want, Writers)
"The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work."
- Augusten Burroughs
(Related: Life, Work, Being, Future, Literature, Study, Writer, Writing)
"Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true."
- Augusten Burroughs
(Related: Want, Writer)
"I was training to be a lawyer... I was president of the law society at Glasgow University, and my bass guitarist was my secretary of my law society; the lead guitarist and writer worked at the law firm that I worked."
- Gerard Butler
(Related: Society, Law, President, Training, University, Writer)
"No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Business, Writer)
"A workshop is a way of renting an audience, and making sure you're communicating what you think you're communicating. It's so easy as a young writer to think you're been very clear when in fact you haven't."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Fact, Writer)
"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."
- Octavia Butler
(Related: Day, Excuses, First, Writers, Writing)
"I never knew a writer yet who took the smallest pains with his style and was at the same time readable."
- Samuel Butler
(Related: Time, Style, Writer)
"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."
- Ruth Buzzi
(Related: Love, Comedy, Martin, Variety, Writers)
"TV is very much a producer and writer or creator-driven machine in the States. And I'm the kind of actor that needs to be pushed and have someone on my case a little bit, so I suffer from that."
- Rose Byrne
(Related: Actor, Machine, Needs, states, Writer)
"You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel."
- Tim Cahill
(Related: Travel, Writer, Writing)
"You have to first be a writer and somebody who loves to write. If I couldn't travel, I would still write."
- Tim Cahill
(Related: Travel, First, Writer)
"I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant."
- Tim Cahill
(Related: God, Opinion, Teenage, Writer, Writers, Years)
"I'm a sort of boy next door. If that boy has a good scriptwriter."
- Michael Caine
"My relatives used to laugh when I talked of being a writer."
- Taylor Caldwell
(Related: Being, Relatives, Writer)
"He invented this idea of telling the life story of a great writer through becoming his characters and becoming him. It was such a pleasure and I thought we must find another writer."
- Simon Callow
(Related: Life, Thought, Idea, Pleasure, Writer)
"There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot."
- L. Sprague de Camp
(Related: Writer)
"They've got this house style which is writer driven. I heard of one person who sent his script in, and Karen Berger said there weren't enough words in it. Put some more in."
- Eddie Campbell
(Related: Style, Words, Writer)
"Being a songwriter, singer, and a great part of a unit is more important than being Joe Guitar Hero."
- Vivian Campbell
(Related: Being, Guitar)
"The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well."
- Elias Canetti
(Related: Aphorisms, Writers)
"The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Education, Knowledge, Career, Writer)
"The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Experience, Life, Hope, Explanations, Questioning, Training, Will, Writer)
"Everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Ideas, First, Writers)
"I realized that everything important in sci-fi showed up in the magazines first. It's the proving ground for new writers and new ideas."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Ideas, First, Writers)
"I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration."
- Orson Scott Card
(Related: Motivation, Admiration, Contempt, Wonder, Writers)
"The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks."
- Humphrey Carpenter
(Related: Being, Learning, Magic, Writer)
"I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face."
- Caleb Carr
(Related: Artist, Fiction, Nothing, Writer)
"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."
- John Le Carre
(Related: Balance, Childhood, Writer, Writers)
"I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives."
- John Le Carre
(Related: Sense, Tension, Writers)
"Every writer knows he is spurious; every fiction writer would rather be credible than authentic."
- John Le Carre
(Related: Fiction, Writer)
"A spy, like a writer, lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it."
- John Le Carre
(Related: Experience, Population, Writer)
"When I was in college, I was the editor of the literary magazine and insisted neither the editors nor the writers be specifically identified-only our student numbers appeared on the title page. I love that idea and still do."
- Jonathan Carroll
(Related: Love, Idea, College, Editors, Literary, Numbers, Writers)
"I've never seen myself as a fantasy writer - ever."
- Jonathan Carroll
(Related: Fantasy, Writer)
"I have daughters who are writers and actors but no musicians."
- Rosanne Cash
(Related: Actors, Daughters, Musicians, Writers)
"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."
- Dan Castellaneta
(Related: Humor, Time, People, Being, Freedom, Writers)
"There are times when the writers ask us to improvise. Sometimes the animators are inspired by what you do, and sometimes you are inspired by what the animators do."
- Dan Castellaneta
(Related: Writers)
"Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen."
- Willa Cather
(Related: Age, Writer)
"To note an artist's limitations is but to define his talent. A reporter can write equally well about everything that is presented to his view, but a creative writer can do his best only with what lies within the range and character of his deepest sympathies."
- Willa Cather
(Related: Talent, Character, Artist, Lies, Limitations, Writer)
"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."
- Nick Cave
(Related: Art, Work, Compliment, Reward, Writers)
"The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem."
- Michael Chabon
(Related: Life, First, Sun, Writer)
"I wasn't involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They asked me at one point to write a memo about what I thought of it."
- Michael Chabon
(Related: Thought, Writer)
"This writer, and all others of his stamp, should remember that the colonies are now in a state of revolt and rebellion against their rightful sovereign."
- James Chalmers
(Related: Now, Rebellion, State, Writer)
"Everything a writer learns about the art or craft of fiction takes just a little away from his need or desire to write at all. In the end he knows all the tricks and has nothing to say."
- Raymond Chandler
(Related: Art, Desire, End, Fiction, Nothing, Writer)
"The English may not always be the best writers in the world, but they are incomparably the best dull writers."
- Raymond Chandler
(Related: English, May, World, Writers)
"Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else."
- Iris Chang
(Related: Duty, First, Writer)
"I always wanted to be a writer."
- Jung Chang
(Related: Writer)
"Then on to all the terrific american songwriters, from Tin Pan Alley to the Beatles, from Bob Dylan to Paul Simon. Whoever wrote and sang in the song form I have appreciated."
- Tom Chapin
(Related: American, Song)
"Success breeds volume, and it's just amazing how many young writers, artists, and musicians there are in town."
- Steven Curtis Chapman
(Related: Success, Artists, Musicians, Writers)
"I would hate to be a new artist or writer in town today. But somehow the cream continues to rise. If there's one who's great, he just jumps out of the pack like you can't believe."
- Steven Curtis Chapman
(Related: Artist, Hate, Today, Writer)
"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."
- Paddy Chayefsky
(Related: Work, Art, Artists, Talk, Thinking, Writers, Writing)
"The task of an American writer is not to describe the misgivings of a woman taken in adultery as she looks out of a window at the rain but to describe four hundred people under the lights reaching for a foul ball. This is ceremony."
- John Cheever
(Related: People, Adultery, American, Ceremony, Rain, Woman, Writer)
"Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego."
- John Cheever
(Related: Ego, Promises, Writers, Writing)
"A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer."
- Anton Chekhov
(Related: Writer)
"First and foremost, I consider myself a songwriter."
- Kenny Chesney
(Related: First)
"I never thought of myself as being a good songwriter. There are a ton of other people that are good songwriters, but I don't think I'm in the club. What I do well is perform, sometimes sing pretty good, and accompany myself well and arrange fairly well."
- Alex Chilton
(Related: Thought, People, Being, Pretty)
"I don't think I'm a great singer myself. I'm all right. I've worked with different writers, different producers... I've just been blessed with the caliber of people I've been able to work with."
- Melanie Chisholm
(Related: Work, People, Right, Writers)
"I did a series called Ned and Stacey for two years for Fox back in the 90s. I was writer on it as well as a producer, and it was very important to me that there were no contemporary references."
- Thomas Haden Church
(Related: Writer, Years)
"The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning."
- Winston Churchill
(Related: Fear, Being, Extremes, Meaning, Sense, Writer)
"Philosophers write for professors; thinkers for writers."
- Emile M. Cioran
(Related: Writers)
"I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog."
- Sandra Cisneros
(Related: Mother, People, Name, School, Writer)
"I think my family and closest friends are learning about my need to withdraw, and I am learning how to restore and store my energy to both serve the community to the best of my ability and to serve my writer's heart."
- Sandra Cisneros
(Related: Family, Heart, Ability, Community, Energy, Friends, Learning, Writer)
"I have to understand what my strengths and limitations are, and work from a true place. I try to do this as best I can while still protecting my writer self, which more than ever needs privacy."
- Sandra Cisneros
(Related: Work, Limitations, Needs, Privacy, Self, Writer)
"I've known Shawn for several years. And he's just an amazing talent. He's a great writer, a marvelous, marvelous guitar player, and plays really good fiddle."
- Guy Clark
(Related: Talent, Guitar, Writer, Years)
"I love writers. All of my best friends are writers."
- Patricia Clarkson
(Related: Love, Friends, Writers)
"I just have a thing for writers. Maybe it because I'm just so not a writer."
- Patricia Clarkson
(Related: Writer, Writers)
"Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there."
- Beverly Cleary
(Related: Writers)
"I tend to have an odd split in my mind: I tend to look at it as a writer and when the writing thing is OK and I'm happy with it, then I put on my actor's hat."
- John Cleese
(Related: Actor, Writer, Writing)
"If writers were good businessmen, they'd have too much sense to be writers."
- Irvin S. Cobb
(Related: Sense, Writers)
"I think if you're a good songwriter, that's what you are first - not a star or celebrity."
- Tom Cochrane
(Related: Celebrity, First)
"As a songwriter, if you can touch people and make them feel a little less alone in the world, then you've done your job."
- Tom Cochrane
(Related: People, Job, World)
"The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination."
- Alexander Cockburn
(Related: Imagination, Travel, World, Writer)
"After the writer's death, reading his journal is like receiving a long letter."
- Jean Cocteau
(Related: Death, Reading, Writer)
"The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me."
- Jonathan Coe
(Related: Books, Writer)
"Writers never feel comfortable having labels attached to them, however accurate they are."
- Jonathan Coe
(Related: Writers)
"The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint."
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: Life, Influence, Writers)
"The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role."
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: Idea, Pretty, Today, Writer)
"That has always seemed to me one of the stranger aspects of literary fame: you prove your competence as a writer and an inventor of stories, and then people clamour for you to make speeches and tell them what you think about the world."
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: People, Competence, Literary, World, Writer)
"In its conception the literature prize belongs to days when a writer could still be thought of as, by virtue of his or her occupation, a sage, someone with no institutional affiliations who could offer an authoritative word on our times as well as on our moral life."
- J. M. Coetzee
(Related: Life, Thought, Virtue, Literature, Occupation, Word, Writer)
"I'm a writer. Now I've started to be on television. I have a big mouth. And I have good TV teeth, they say."
- Steven Cojocaru
(Related: Now, Television, Writer)
"Since I was the solo artist as well as the writer for the songs, I figured I had enough credits on it already."
- Cy Coleman
(Related: Artist, Songs, Writer)
"Until you understand a writer's ignorance, presume yourself ignorant of his understanding."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Ignorance, Understanding, Writer)
"Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge
(Related: Bible, Being, Study, Style, Will, Writer)
"Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it."
- Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
(Related: Pity, Worth, Writer)
"In Genesis we saw ourselves as song-writers. After Peter Gabriel left I was the first to say: 'It's OK - we can just do instrumentals.'"
- Phil Collins
(Related: First, Song)
"When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry."
- William Collins
(Related: Work, Writer, Wrong)
"That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time."
- Charles Caleb Colton
(Related: Time, Knowledge, Writer)
"What you do is get the right director and the right screenwriter and the right cast. It's a fantastic job."
- Robbie Coltrane
(Related: Job, Right)
"I think the only boundaries are individual and personal. A writer should be free to write about anything he or she wants to, including the twin towers. I have made small references to 9/11 in my past two books."
- Michael Connelly
(Related: Books, Past, Writer)
"The more books we read, the clearer it becomes that the true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and that no other task is of any consequence."
- Cyril Connolly
(Related: Books, Writer)
"The only way for writers to meet is to share a quick peek over a common lamp-post."
- Cyril Connolly
(Related: Quick, Writers)
"The true function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece and no other task is of any consequence."
- Cyril Connolly
(Related: Writer)
"A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out."
- Cyril Connolly
(Related: May, Will, World, Writer)
"Nowadays they have 12 directors and 15 producers and 30 writers. And all the writers want their lines said a certain way-which isn't necessarily funny. I mean the lines aren't necessarily so funny to begin with."
- Tim Conway
(Related: Funny, Want, Writers)
"Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean."
- Mason Cooley
(Related: Writers)
"I'm one of the lucky writers: plots come easily to me."
- Caroline B. Cooney
"I think it's a question which particularly arises over women writers: whether it's better to have a happy life or a good supply of tragic plots."
- Wendy Cope
(Related: Life, Women, Question)
"I wrote the script of Patton. I had this very bizarre opening where he stands up in front of an American flag and gives this speech. Ultimately, I was fired. When the script was done, they hired another writer and that script was forgotten."
- Francis Ford Coppola
(Related: American, Bizarre, Speech, Writer)
"The head writer loves that my character is a boor."
- Rob Corddry
(Related: Character, Writer)
"Other writers, producers, and directors of low-budget films would often put down the film they were making, saying it was just something to make money with. I never felt that. If I took the assignment, I'd give it my best shot."
- Roger Corman
(Related: Money, Film, Saying, Writers)
"My dream was to be known as a writer and to be able to produce at least one book that would be read by people. That dream came true with the publication of my first novel - and all the rest has been a sweet bonus."
- Robert Cormier
(Related: People, Dream, First, Rest, Writer)
"I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer."
- Robert Cormier
(Related: Books, Writer)
"At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career."
- Bernard Cornwell
(Related: Beginning, Career, Risk, Writers, Writing)
"What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?"
- Julio Cortazar
(Related: Destruction, Help, Literature, Writer)
"You have to face the fact that I have no reputation as a composer; I have my reputation as a songwriter and a performer-and that opportunity came this summer, when I was invited to perform at the Lincoln Centre festival in New York... three nights."
- Elvis Costello
(Related: Opportunity, Fact, Reputation, Summer)
"Shakespeare, who is probably the greatest writer and poet of the English language, lived in a time that was politically very conservative and it's reflected in his writings."
- Alex Cox
(Related: Time, Conservative, English, Language, Shakespeare, Writer)
"Even in the beginning, when we knew there was a legal argument about how much our song sounds like his song, as one songwriter to another, I wasn't sure that Cat Stevens would take that as bad."
- Wayne Coyne
(Related: Legal, Argument, Beginning, Song)
"The letters were universally complimentary, and we designers loved hearing that our games were being enjoyed, but if they weren't sending us a picture of their screens most of those writers would have spent their time playing the game rather than writing letters."
- David Crane
(Related: Time, Being, Games, Hearing, Letters, Writers, Writing)
"There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings."
- Quentin Crisp
(Related: Money, First, Winter, World)
"I spend days with writers' block. It is a problem."
- Mackenzie Crook
(Related: Writers)
"As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy."
- David Cross
(Related: Work, Ability, Comedy, Film, Writer)
"A prose writer gets tired of writing prose, and wants to be a poet. So he begins every line with a capital letter, and keeps on writing prose."
- Samuel McChord Crothers
(Related: Prose, Writer, Writing)
"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."
- Stanley Crouch
(Related: Democracy, Reading, Writers)
"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."
- Stanley Crouch
(Related: Experience, Time, People, First, Job, Violence, Writers)
"Most writers like to maintain some sort of anonymity. For me, making videos was an assault."
- Sheryl Crow
(Related: Writers)
"Probably having fallen in love with music and movies at a young age and then first learning about writing by kind of following the path of writers like Dave Marsh and Lester Bangs and being a rock journalist."
- Cameron Crowe
(Related: Age, Love, Movies, Music, Being, First, Learning, Writers, Writing)
"Well it kind of is project to project because as a writer I think you always write to some degree about things that you know or things that happened - but my favourite filmmakers, my favourite movies of theirs tend to be the personal movies."
- Cameron Crowe
(Related: Movies, Project, Writer)
"There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call 'the breaks.' In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things - read and write - and wait."
- Countee Cullen
(Related: Success, Work, Hard work, Order, Succeed, Writer)
"I have no problem selling books to media franchises and we do it all the time. The author must understand that he/she is a writer for hire and has no control over copyright or over editorial changes made to the text."
- Richard Curtis
(Related: Time, Control, Selling, Books, Media, Writer)
"It's always a mistake for writers to key their submissions to world events, because they move so quickly and unpredictably, as has certainly proven the case in Afghanistan."
- Richard Curtis
(Related: Mistake, Afghanistan, Events, Key, World, Writers)
"The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him."
- Roald Dahl
(Related: Work, Force, Writer)
"Two hours of writing fiction leaves this writer completely drained. For those two hours he has been in a different place with totally different people."
- Roald Dahl
(Related: People, Fiction, Writer, Writing)
"A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not."
- Roald Dahl
(Related: Fear, Ideas, Day, Fiction, Writer)
"A person is a fool to become a writer. His only compensation is absolute freedom."
- Roald Dahl
(Related: Fool, Freedom, Writer)
"The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it."
- Roald Dahl
(Related: Needs, Writer)
"I'm not going to get into the writer's skills or what he was trying to portray because that's not fair. I can only say what I felt was trying to be portrayed there."
- Taylor Dane
(Related: Trying, Writer)
"I am a struggling writer. A middle-aged man with two little kids and I'm just trying to earn a living. So buy this book - or my kids will have to go to foster care."
- Christopher Darden
(Related: Care, Kids, Living, Man, Trying, Will, Writer)
"The Lord taught me to love everybody, but the last ones I learned to love were the sportswriters."
- Alvin Dark
(Related: Love)
"The writers want to know were you made your mistake, no how well your curve is breaking."
- Alvin Dark
(Related: Mistake, Want, Writers)
"I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't."
- Robyn Davidson
(Related: Travel, Writer)
"The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task."
- Robertson Davies
(Related: Writer)
"The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer."
- Robertson Davies
(Related: Quality, Writer)
"People die from typewriters falling on their heads."
- Jonathan Davis
(Related: People)
"I think male roles are generally much better written. So for actresses, we're always dealing with trying to inject a role with more truth than the writer possibly had in mind."
- Judy Davis
(Related: Truth, Mind, Trying, Writer)
"I did what most writers do when something happens that's overwhelming, fascinating, moving, all of that. I didn't know what else to do about it except write about it."
- Patti Davis
(Related: Writers)
"When the band begins to get a name for themselves, and the writers get assigned to bands, they'll hit somebody who just doesn't like that kind of music, or they love hip hop but hate guitar rock."
- Kim Deal
(Related: Love, Music, Guitar, Hate, Name, Writers)
"Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories."
- Jeffery Deaver
(Related: Life, Day, Relationships, Writers)
"The best way to learn about writing is to study the work of other writers you admire."
- Jeffery Deaver
(Related: Work, Study, Writers, Writing)
"To answer that I have to describe what I think is my responsibility as a thriller writer: To give my readers the most exciting roller coaster ride of a suspense story I can possibly think of."
- Jeffery Deaver
(Related: Responsibility, Suspense)
"I've often said that there's no such thing as writer's block; the problem is idea block."
- Jeffery Deaver
(Related: Idea, Writer)
"I could tell it was a popular move as a writer to walk down the bass lines while you were writing a song."
- Gavin DeGraw
(Related: Popular, Song, Writer, Writing)
"Writers are frequently asked why they wrote their first book. A more interesting answer might come from asking them why they wrote their second one."
- Len Deighton
(Related: First, Writers)
"Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it. Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer."
- Len Deighton
(Related: Intention, Politicians, Writer)
"Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Truth, End, Waiting, Writer)
"American writers ought to stand and live in the margins, and be more dangerous."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: American, Writers)
"In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Society, Act, May, Repetition, Terror, Writer)
"One truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it's the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Truth, Integrity, Language, Writer)
"There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Force, Right, Will, Writer)
"If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Work, Perception, Being, Literature, Writer)
"I think more than writers, the major influences on me have been European movies, jazz, and Abstract Expressionism."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Movies, Jazz, Writers)
"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."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Vision, Consciousness, Deep, Language, Terror, Writers)
"Writers in repressive societies are considered dangerous. That's why so many of them are in jail."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Writers)
"The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence."
- Don DeLillo
(Related: Society, Influence, Writer)
"There were five writers on Blazing Saddles."
- Dom DeLuise
(Related: Writers)
"I was a pretty good fighter. But it was the writers who made me great."
- Jack Dempsey
(Related: Pretty, Writers)
"They're pretty particular about what they show. They certainly edit the scripts and have conversations with the writers about what they are and aren't willing to portray. But the writers and the network are pretty much on the same page."
- James Denton
(Related: Network, Pretty, Writers)
"My family is involved and my wife Brenda is a great, great writer. She helps me with the writing of everything and also sings with me. I owe a lot to Brenda."
- Rick Derringer
(Related: Family, Wife, Writer, Writing)
"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."
- Jackie DeShannon
(Related: Song, Songs, Writers)
"The same issue is happening on a show like Everybody Loves Raymond now, which is in its eighth year and struggling to come up with good stories. It'll be interesting to see how they do. The bottom line is, it starts with the writers and ends with the writers."
- William Devane
(Related: Now, Writers)
"Writers are not always right however, but then again, I've been on shows where the actors have complete control and change everything and it's terrible."
- William Devane
(Related: Change, Control, Actors, Right, Writers)
"There's a certain possessiveness of writers sometimes."
- William Devane
(Related: Writers)
"I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love."
- Anita Diament
(Related: Love, Letters, Reading, Rejection, Writers)
"Understand, I had absolutely no interest in writing; I wanted to be a Writer."
- Kate DiCamillo
(Related: Interest, Writer, Writing)
"Every well-written book is a light for me. When you write, you use other writers and their books as guides in the wilderness."
- Kate DiCamillo
(Related: Books, Light, Wilderness, Writers)
"Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful."
- Philip K. Dick
(Related: Science, Knowledge, Fiction, Talk, Writers)
"The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers."
- Joan Didion
(Related: Life, Children, Fancy, Order, Writers)
"Writers are always selling somebody out."
- Joan Didion
(Related: Selling, Writers)
"The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to their dream."
- Joan Didion
(Related: Dream, Listening, Writer)
"The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write."
- Annie Dillard
(Related: Literature, Will, World, Writer)
"People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subject inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all."
- Annie Dillard
(Related: Love, People, Pretty, Writer)
"Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles."
- Annie Dillard
(Related: Excitement, First, Impossibility, Writer)
"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."
- E. L. Doctorow
(Related: Reason, Writer, Writers)
"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."
- E. L. Doctorow
(Related: Time, People, Writers)
"Travel definitely affects me as a writer."
- Anthony Doerr
(Related: Travel, Writer)
"You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't."
- Anthony Doerr
(Related: Writer)
"Well, there are more writers of blogs right now than there are readers, so that's clearly a vanity phenomenon."
- John Doerr
(Related: Now, Right, Vanity, Writers)
"The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies."
- Carl Van Doren
(Related: First, Rest, Writers)
"In high school, my goal was to be a writer for SNL, then I got into the acting."
- Illeana Douglas
(Related: Goal, Acting, School, Writer)
"If they don't read, if they don't love reading; if they don't find themselves compulsively reading, I don't think they're really a writer."
- Rita Dove
(Related: Love, Reading, Writer)
"I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers."
- Rita Dove
(Related: People, Writers)
"Young writers should definitely research the current sounds and styles."
- Lamont Dozier
(Related: Research, Writers)
"Well I could have been just a writer. I had been a hair dresser. I could have stuck with that."
- Fran Drescher
(Related: Hair, Writer)
"I have no agenda except to be funny. Neither I or the writers profess to offer any worldly wisdom."
- Julia Louis Dreyfus
(Related: Wisdom, Funny, Writers)
"The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter."
- Isadora Duncan
(Related: Experience, First, Writer, Writing)
"Writing children's books gives a writer a very strong sense of narrative drive."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Books, Children, Sense, Writer, Writing)
"I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us."
- Helen Dunmore
(Related: Progress, Poems, Poets, Reading, Sense, Writers)
"I grew up wanting to be a writer for theatre."
- Christopher Durang
(Related: Theatre, Writer)
"Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country."
- Marguerite Duras
(Related: Men, Women, Country, Writer)
"The writers are writing human beings, and they're writing about the human condition and how difficult it is to function in that condition. I think it's one of the charms of the show, the idea of redemption and working towards becoming better people, for everybody involved."
- George Dzundza
(Related: People, Idea, Writers, Writing)
"Townes van Zandt is the best songwriter in the whole world and I'll stand on Bob Dylan's coffee table in my cowboy boots and say that."
- Steve Earle
(Related: Coffee, World)
"I think the criticism that I take to heart is from other writers that I respect."
- Steve Earle
(Related: Heart, Criticism, Respect, Writers)
"For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker."
- Gregg Easterbrook
(Related: Controversy, Writer, Writing)
"I mean, the problem is, I think I'm a great writer."
- Aaron Eckhart
(Related: Writer)
"This is terrible, when a writer is bored by his own work, but it was a real bomb and had reached the point where I couldn't even stand to look at it any more."
- David Eddings
(Related: Work, Writer)
"If an army of monkeys were strumming on typewriters, they might write all the books in the British Museum."
- Arthur Eddington
(Related: Army, Books)
"I never considered myself a songwriter, but now since I've been working with Nick Lowe, I am contributing to an extent. But I'm the guitarist and he's not, so we compliment each other in a way."
- Dave Edmunds
(Related: Compliment, Now)
"I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published."
- Greg Egan
(Related: Writers)
"Being rewarded for anything other than the quality of their work is the fastest way to screw-up a writer-and it isn't only new ones who suffer from that."
- Greg Egan
(Related: Work, Quality, Being, Writer)
"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."
- Greg Egan
(Related: First, Publishing, Writers)
"Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times."
- Greg Egan
(Related: Science, Flying, Writers)
"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."
- Pliny the Elder
(Related: Word, Writers)
"Most writers can write, most rock 'n rollers cannot."
- Andrew Eldritch
(Related: Writers)
"Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers."
- T. S. Eliot
(Related: Editors, Writers)
"How do I tell people who I am? Not being a writer, the only way is to sing songs that reflect my opinions."
- Cass Elliot
(Related: People, Being, Opinions, Songs, Writer)
"By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication."
- Ralph Ellison
(Related: Communication, Identity, Importance, Sense, Writer, Writing)
"I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective."
- James Ellroy
(Related: Career, Months, Play, Writer, Writing)
"I always value my large kitchen because it was better to do everything there, you wash up, you do everything, rather than messing up another room and I pop my typewriter just next to it. So I still write now but I was doing more writing when the children were younger."
- Buchi Emecheta
(Related: Children, Kitchen, Now, Value, Writing)
"I believe it is important to speak to your readers in person... to enable people to have a whole picture of me; I have to both write and speak. I view my role as writer and also as oral communicator."
- Buchi Emecheta
(Related: People, Writer)
"I always serve the writer first because I'm English trained, even though I'm American."
- Robert Englund
(Related: American, English, First, Writer)
"If you wish to be a writer, write."
- Epictetus
(Related: Writer)
"Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with."
- Louise Erdrich
(Related: Love, Writer)
"I'm a writer and this is what I love to do."
- Gloria Estefan
(Related: Love, Writer)
"I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime."
- Joe Eszterhas
(Related: Past, Writer)
"From a writing point of view, you now have teams of screenwriters working with a director. What's lost in the process is the power of that one heart, brain, gut and soul that makes something an original piece of writing."
- Joe Eszterhas
(Related: Power, Soul, Heart, Now, Writing)
"There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves."
- Cliff Fadiman
(Related: Writers)
"There's one good kind of writer - a dead one."
- James T. Farrell
(Related: Writer)
"The artist doesn't have time to listen to the critics. The ones who want to be writers read the reviews, the ones who want to write don't have the time to read reviews."
- William Faulkner
(Related: Time, Artist, Want, Writers)
"A writer must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid."
- William Faulkner
(Related: Writer)
"If a writer has to rob his mother, he will not hesitate: The "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is worth any number of old ladies."
- William Faulkner
(Related: Mother, Ladies, Old, Will, Worth, Writer)
"One likes to think one grows as a writer as one ages, else all you get is an "old" young writer. Beyond that is the changing landscape of the universe and the stories I choose to tell."
- Raymond E. Feist
(Related: Universe, Writer)
"Writers should be read but not seen. Rarely are they a winsome sight."
- Edna Ferber
(Related: Sight, Writers)
"Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death."
- Edna Ferber
(Related: Death, Life, Love, Defeat, Writer, Writing)
"If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs."
- Tina Fey
(Related: Comedy, Dress, Lady, Man, Old, Stairs, Want, Writers)
"Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Writer)
"My assignment is what every writer's assignment is: tell the truth of his own time."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Time, Truth, Writer)
"Kafka is still unrecognized. He thought he was a comic writer."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Thought, Writer)
"When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Writer)
"Writers always know whether you like them or not."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Writers)
"I've been writing about James Fenimore Cooper. He was not a writer. Here was a man who was 30 years old and had never put anything more than his signature on paper."
- Leslie Fiedler
(Related: Man, Old, Writer, Writing, Years)
"The songwriter mustn't fall in love with his own song. If it doesn't belong, he can't push it into a show. Let him save it; maybe it'll fit in another show."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Love, Song)
"There aren't more lady songwriters for the same reason that there aren't more lady doctors or lady accountants or lady lawyers; not enough women have the time for careers."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Time, Women, Careers, Doctors, Lady, Lawyers, Reason)
"A songwriter should have friends who are similarly interested; should move about in the milieu of work he has chosen for himself."
- Dorothy Fields
(Related: Work, Friends)
"I love new writing, new blood, modern works by unknown writers."
- Joseph Fiennes
(Related: Love, Blood, Writers, Writing)
"There's a challenge to playing these fantasy figures because they are fantasy figures. You have to enter into this sort of imaginative world of the writer."
- Ralph Fiennes
(Related: Challenge, Fantasy, World, Writer)
"It's a marvellous life, a gregarious life that we've had. We're very lucky in that way. Unlike writers or painters, we don't sit down in front of a blank canvas and say, 'How do I start? Where do I start?'"
- Albert Finney
(Related: Life, Writers)
"My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward."
- F. Scott Fitzgerald
(Related: Idea, Writer, Youth)
"I love to rock 'n roll. But my finest suit, of all the things I do, is as a songwriter."
- Dan Fogelberg
(Related: Love)
"Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer."
- Ken Follet
(Related: Books, Writer)
"An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit."
- Ken Follett
(Related: Women, Credit, Writers)
"World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years."
- Ken Follett
(Related: Love, War, History, Battle, Drama, Evil, Will, World, World war, Writers, Years)
"Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers."
- Ken Follett
(Related: Movies, Writers)
"If I have enough ego to say I'm a writer, a director, a producer, and an actor, I should have the energy and the knowledge to write a scene for this great actor named Henry Fonda and direct him in it and have it work."
- Peter Fonda
(Related: Work, Knowledge, Actor, Ego, Energy, Writer)
"I don't want anything to do with anything mechanical between me and the paper, including a typewriter, and I don't even want a fountain pen between me and the paper."
- Shelby Foote
(Related: Pen, Want)
"I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry."
- Shelby Foote
(Related: Poetry, Trying, Writers, Writing)
"And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War."
- Shelby Foote
(Related: War, Day, Reason, Words, Years)
"I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something."
- Shelby Foote
(Related: Experience, Success, Adversity, Being, Writer)
"At times during high school and college I wished to be a sportswriter."
- Luke Ford
(Related: College, School)
"They're hit writers. They're gonna write me a hit whether I wanted it or not you know? I could have put out a single a year ago with the Neptunes and maybe been writing now on top but that was not the path that I chose."
- Willa Ford
(Related: Now, Writers, Writing)
"Letters have to pass two tests before they can be classed as good: they must express the personality both of the writer and of the recipient."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Letters, Personality, Tests, Writer)
"Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Causes, Writers)
"Only a writer who has the sense of evil can make goodness readable."
- E. M. Forster
(Related: Evil, Goodness, Sense, Writer)
"The overwhelming triumph of the international multimedia conglomerate has resulted in less diversity within the field and has made it much harder for newer writers not only to break in, but to make any kind of a living while doing so."
- Alan Dean Foster
(Related: Diversity, Living, Writers)
"Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer. All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer. Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it. I was going to be a lawyer, but I got saved."
- Alan Dean Foster
(Related: Science, Thought, Being, Growing up, Reading, Writer)
"The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from."
- Gene Fowler
(Related: Successful, Forget, Writer, Writing)
"Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running."
- Gene Fowler
(Related: Running, Writing)
"I had all the usual ambition growing up. I wanted to be a writer, a musician, a hockey player. I wanted to do something that wasn't nine to five. Acting was the first thing I tried that clicked."
- Michael J. Fox
(Related: Acting, Ambition, First, Growing up, Writer)
"I think Star Trek has been very double-edged for all of us - as actors, writers, directors."
- Jonathan Frakes
(Related: Actors, Writers)
"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."
- Jonathan Frakes
(Related: American, Baseball, Jazz, Literature, Writers)
"The first thing is that we're being attacked by both the Writers Guild and the Producers Guild. Both of these groups are trying to diminish the importance and strength of the director. They're trying to do it through both frontal and side attacks."
- John Frankenheimer
(Related: Strength, Being, First, Importance, Trying, Writers)
"I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer."
- Jonathan Franzen
(Related: Writer, Writers)
"That is my major concern: writers who are in prison for writing."
- Antonia Fraser
(Related: Prison, Writers, Writing)
"The reason actors, artists, writers have agents is because we'll do it for nothing. That's a basic fact - you gotta do it."
- Morgan Freeman
(Related: Actors, Artists, Fact, Nothing, Reason, Writers)
"Papa continually emphasizes how much remains unexplained. With the other psychoanalytic writers, everything is always so known and fixed."
- Anna Freud
(Related: Writers)
"I may not be the most famous songwriter in the world, but you know a David Friedman song when you hear it. It took me a long time to appreciate that."
- David Friedman
(Related: Time, Famous, May, Song, World)
"The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Writer)
"Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Mind, Saying, Style, Writer)
"No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Tears, Writer)
"I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Music, English, May, Sense, Sound, Writers)
"I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn."
- Robert Frost
(Related: Books, Order, Talk, Writer)
"And this whole period of time of gradually working at being a better guitar player and songwriter have gradually led me to the point where I feel I'm doing a clearer representation of the thing that I've been feeling inside me since I was four years old."
- John Frusciante
(Related: Time, Being, Feeling, Guitar, Old, Years)
"Sinatra was pretty astute - he used the best songwriters around, he used all the resources, he covered every song from the era basically."
- Martin Fry
(Related: Pretty, Song)
"Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day."
- Stephen Fry
(Related: Acting, Actor, Day, Grave, Writer, Writing, Years)
"I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them."
- Carlos Fuentes
(Related: Experience, Books, Writer)
"There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work."
- William Gaddis
(Related: Work, Nothing, Reading, Writer)
"How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me."
- William Gaddis
(Related: Books, Boredom, Dying, Writers)
"I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out."
- Neil Gaiman
(Related: Fun, Writers)
"Rock and roll stars have it much better than writers when they're on a tour."
- Neil Gaiman
(Related: Stars, Writers)
"I'm a fairly undisciplined writer."
- Neil Gaiman
(Related: Writer)
"So I went out and bought myself a copy of the Writer and Artist Yearbook, bought lots of magazines and got on the phone and talked to editors about ideas for stories. Pretty soon I found myself hired to do interviews and articles and went off and did them."
- Neil Gaiman
(Related: Ideas, Artist, Editors, Pretty, Writer)
"As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning."
- Neil Gaiman
(Related: Reason, Writer)
"You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it."
- Neil Gaiman
(Related: Time, People, Ideas, Being, Difference, Writers)
"All writers are vampires."
- James Gandolfini
(Related: Writers)
"You know, all writers are vampires and they'll look around and they watch you when you're not even thinking they're watching you and they'll slip stuff in."
- James Gandolfini
(Related: Thinking, Writers)
"For a long period in my life - it lasted about 10 years - I had writer's block."
- Mary Garden
(Related: Life, Writer, Years)
"My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness."
- Mary Garden
(Related: Illness, Writer)
"Paul's the writer. Yeah, I wrote a little of that stuff, but that's just technically true. In spirit, and in essence of the truth, it doesn't matter. So I don't know, maybe I'm being foolish for not being technical. Yeah, I wrote a certain portion of the things."
- Art Garfunkel
(Related: Truth, Being, Spirit, Writer)
"Well, I'm at some kind of crossroads in my life and I don't know which way to take. It's not about money, I mean, because I'm established enough now as a writer to get a reasonable advance if I wanted to do fiction."
- Helen Garner
(Related: Life, Money, Fiction, Now, Writer)
"I think writers are very anxious."
- Helen Garner
(Related: Writers)
"Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves."
- Helen Garner
(Related: Life, People, Thinking, Writers)
"I think of myself as a writer who happens to be doing his writing as an anthropologist."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: Writer, Writing)
"If I remember correctly, a writer is someone who wants to convey information. Language or writing is a code."
- Clifford Geertz
(Related: Information, Language, Writer, Writing)
"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."
- Elizabeth George
(Related: Art, Wisdom, Talent, Encouraging, America, Dying, Footsteps, Necessity, Writers, Writing)
"Some writers and producers are currently writing a sitcom for me, so we'll see what happens there. I'm somewhat reluctant to talk about some of the upcoming projects that I'm working on; I've a lot of stuff on the go, including five pictures that I'm looking at producing."
- Gil Gerard
(Related: Projects, Talk, Writers, Writing)
"What description of clouds and sunsets was to the old novelist, description of scientific apparatus and methods is to the modern Scientific Detective writer."
- Hugo Gernsback
(Related: Clouds, Old, Writer)
"I'm really happy that I got to work with such fresh talent. In a day when record companies are not particularly good at encouraging young, talented songwriters to come forward and get exposure, I think it's important to give tomorrow's songwriters the opportunity."
- Robin Gibb
(Related: Work, Talent, Opportunity, Encouraging, Day, Tomorrow)
"The Bee Gees were always heavily influenced by black music. As a songwriter, it's never been difficult to pick up on the changing styles of music out there, and soul has always been my favourite genre."
- Robin Gibb
(Related: Music, Soul)
"Our writers are full of cliches just as old barns are full of bats. There is obviously no rule about this, except that anything that you suspect of being a cliche undoubtedly is one and had better be removed."
- Wolcott Gibbs
(Related: Being, Cliches, Old, Writers)
"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."
- William Gibson
(Related: Dreams, Science, Job, Public, Writers)
"To read a writer is for me not merely to get an idea of what he says, but to go off with him and travel in his company."
- Andre Gide
(Related: Travel, Idea, Company, Writer)
"I pretty much only write by default, because I want to make certain projects so instead of trying to wait and find them, I create them, but I'm not really a writer."
- Sara Gilbert
(Related: Pretty, Projects, Trying, Want, Writer)
"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."
- William E. Gladstone
(Related: Successful, Mediocrity, Now, Prose, Writers)
"In 1967, the students at San Francisco State invited the poet Amiri Baraka to the campus for a semester. He attracted other influential black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver. What emerged was something we called the community communications program. That's how I got involved; I got involved in a little play."
- Danny Glover
(Related: Community, Play, State, Students, Writers)
"An artist can go paint, and a writer can go write, but an actor needs to get hired, needs somebody to say, 'Here, come and do this,' That's the hard part."
- John Glover
(Related: Actor, Artist, Needs, Writer)
"You get a letter from her agency embracing you into the family that says, 'It is our goal now to help you achieve your dream of being a songwriter, in John's memory.'"
- Arthur Godfrey
(Related: Family, Dream, Goal, Being, Help, Memory, Now)
"He asked if I was a songwriter, and I said yeah, that I was in town because I'd won this contest. He said, okay, then he was gonna play me his hit, and started singing 'When it's time to relax, one beer stands clear... '"
- Arthur Godfrey
(Related: Time, Beer, Play, Relax, Singing)
"I really believe in myself. I'm the hardest worker I know, and one of the best songwriters. There's a craft to it, and it takes a long time to hone it, and I work really hard at it."
- Arthur Godfrey
(Related: Time, Work)
"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."
- Fay Godwin
(Related: Country, First, Living, Writers)
"Diverting the internal traffic between the Writer as Angel of Light and the Writer as Hustler is that scribbling child in a grown-up body wondering if anybody is listening."
- Herbert Gold
(Related: Body, Light, Listening, Writer)
"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."
- Herbert Gold
(Related: Beauty, Truth, Careers, Literature, Living, Meaning, Memories, Nerves, Writers)
"The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it."
- William Golding
(Related: Forget, Writer)
"Being a screenwriter is not enough for a full creative life."
- William Goldman
(Related: Life, Being)
"As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease."
- Oliver Goldsmith
(Related: Knowledge, Desire, Writers)
"Here I am paying big money to you writers and what for? All you do is change the words."
- Samuel Goldwyn
(Related: Change, Money, Words, Writers)
"The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable."
- Nadine Gordimer
(Related: History, Act, Writer)
"A lot of the great songwriters in history have been collaborators, with a separate lyricist."
- Mike Gordon
(Related: History)
"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."
- Mark-Paul Gosselaar
(Related: People, Character, Writers, Writing)
"Our great American writers were all newspaper people."
- John Gould
(Related: People, American, Writers)
"The writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is never innocent."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Inspiration, Innocence, Language, Writer)
"In times when religious or political faith or hope predominates, the writer functions totally in unison with society, and expresses society's feelings, beliefs, and hopes in perfect harmony."
- Juan Goytisolo
(Related: Faith, Society, Feelings, Hope, Beliefs, Harmony, Religious, Writer)
"My primary lesson, however, was that I'm a solo writer, happiest when I'm making all the executive decisions. I've always been willing to rise or fall on my own merits."
- Sue Grafton
(Related: Decisions, Writer)
"I have been under considerable pressure to buy at least a laptop computer. I have always turned the suggestions down for the reason that I have never done creative work on a typewriter. There is to me a lack of empathy."
- Winston Graham
(Related: Work, Computer, Empathy, Pressure, Reason)
"A lot of very, very big stars were going down and not being seen or heard from again. Kirk took a huge chance in putting a blacklisted writer's name on the screen and somehow or other, he survived it, like he survives everything."
- Lee Grant
(Related: Being, Chance, Name, Stars, Writer)
"It's well known that actors are lousy writers."
- Richard Grant
(Related: Actors, Writers)
"Ellington is a writer and arranger, as well as a musician and leader. He does movie sound tracks."
- Norman Granz
(Related: Leader, Sound, Writer)
"It's unfortunate we've never been just songwriters."
- Adolph Green
"He would catapult you forward, and that was his intention with the Jazz Messengers. He would take young people with a potential and help them develop a voice as a player and as a writer."
- Benny Green
(Related: People, Help, Intention, Jazz, Potential, Voice, Writer)
"My two fingers on a typewriter have never connected with my brain. My hand on a pen does. A fountain pen, of course. Ball-point pens are only good for filling out forms on a plane."
- Graham Greene
(Related: Pen)
"The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties."
- Graham Greene
(Related: People, Being, Listening, Word, Writer)
"If I'd had more time or been a better writer, I would have tried to put the same ideas and experiences into a novel. But I didn't so I slapped it up on the Web."
- Philip Greenspun
(Related: Time, Ideas, Writer)
"No one connected intimately with a writer has any appreciation of his temperament, except to think him overdoing everything."
- Zane Grey
(Related: Appreciation, Temperament, Writer)
"Dorsey played the upright bass and steel guitar, as well as acoustic guitar. Johnny played acoustic guitar and together they were fabulous songwriters and singers."
- Jimmy Griffin
(Related: Guitar)
"I had a mixture, my father was a career army man and my mother was a writer."
- Bill Griffith
(Related: Mother, Father, Army, Career, Man, Writer)
"Being a good songwriter means paying attention and sticking your hand out the window to catch the song on the way to someone else's house!"
- Nanci Griffith
(Related: Attention, Being, Song)
"Even though my songs may sound very personal, to me most of them are fiction. It is a great way for me to be able to live a fantasy life as a writer because I get to be someone else, someplace else for three and a half minutes, just like the listener."
- Nanci Griffith
(Related: Life, Fantasy, Fiction, May, Songs, Sound, Writer)
"I seriously doubt I would ever have written the first story had I not been a lawyer. I never dreamed of being a writer. I wrote only after witnessing a trial."
- John Grisham
(Related: Being, Doubt, First, Writer)
"A lot of our writers, like Conan O'Brien, moved on to other things."
- Matt Groening
(Related: Writers)
"Since I was there in the very beginning, I know the history of the characters. So, I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we've done that before."
- Matt Groening
(Related: History, Beginning, Writers)
"We've got a bunch of new writers now who tell me they grew up watching The Simpsons. It's bizarre, and they're writing some very funny stuff."
- Matt Groening
(Related: Funny, Bizarre, Now, Writers, Writing)
"The writers led by Mike Scully are fantastic. And they're creating original stories that not only don't repeat what we've already done, they also don't repeat anything I've seen on television."
- Matt Groening
(Related: Television, Writers)
"I think you have an obligation to share what you know as a writer."
- David Guterson
(Related: Obligation, Writer)
"I became paralyzed as an artist with writer's block."
- David Guterson
(Related: Artist, Writer)
"I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged."
- David Guterson
(Related: Successful, Being, Expectation, First, Promise, Sense, Writers)
"Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me."
- David Guterson
(Related: Money, Time, Thought, Habit, Being, Books, English, Thinking, Writers, Writing)
"When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer."
- David Guterson
(Related: Class, College, Writer, Writing)
"I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Literary, Poems, Reading, Want, Writer)
"I have experienced healing through other writers' poetry, but there's no way I can sit down to write in the hope a poem will have healing potential. If I do, I'll write a bad poem."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Poetry, Hope, Healing, Potential, Will, Writers)
"When you translate poetry in particular, you're obliged to look at how the writer with whom you're working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence."
- Marilyn Hacker
(Related: Poetry, Tension, Words, Writer)
"My creative partner is a writer, and he's got an executive producing credit on this film. We've made three films together and I would never underestimate the impact of a writer."
- Taylor Hackford
(Related: Credit, Film, Writer)
"But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is."
- Taylor Hackford
(Related: People, Being, Film, Literary, Writer)
"Listen to advice. You don't know how many writer's conferences I've taught at where at least half the audience fights all the conventions of the field."
- Jane Haddam
(Related: Advice, Writer)
"When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me."
- Margaret Haddix
(Related: Being, Flexibility, Freedom, Writer, Writing)
"I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Hope, Being, Gay, Writer, Writing)
"I think most writers feel like they're on the outside looking in much of the time. All of us feel, to a certain extent, alienated from the stuff going on around us."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Time, Writers)
"Many children's writers don't have children of their own."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: Children, Writers)
"There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country."
- Mark Haddon
(Related: America, American, Country, Writers)
"Becoming a mother has helped make me a tougher, stronger writer."
- Jessica Hagedorn
(Related: Mother, Writer)
"I don't think of myself as a director or writer. I think of myself as a filmmaker."
- Conrad Hall
(Related: Writer)
"I was quite a reader before I became a writer."
- Tom T. Hall
(Related: Writer)
"A writer who is in a hurry to be understood today or tomorrow runs the danger of being misunderstood the day after tomorrow."
- Johann G. Hamann
(Related: Being, Danger, Day, Today, Tomorrow, Writer)
"One of my rules is never explain. A writer is a lot like a magician, if you explain how the trick works then a lot of the magic turns mundane."
- Laurell K. Hamilton
(Related: Magic, Rules, Writer)
"I'm more influenced by my own interests than anyone else's. Writers have to entertain themselves, or they can't entertain anyone else."
- Laurell K. Hamilton
(Related: Writers)
"I've lost track of the number of people who want to be writers but never actually write anything. Talking about writing, dreaming about writing, can be very fun, but it won't get a book written. You've got to write."
- Laurell K. Hamilton
(Related: People, Fun, Talking, Want, Writers, Writing)
"Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs."
- Christopher Hampton
(Related: Dogs, Writer)
"I am, really, a great writer; my only difficulty is in finding great readers."
- Frank Harris
(Related: Difficulty, Writer)
"It would not be fair to the critics of Rotary, who include some of the most brilliant of the British and American writers, to charge them with prejudice."
- Paul Harris
(Related: American, Prejudice, Writers)
"Most comic scriptwriters are very bad. The artists are good, but the writers are so bad."
- Harry Harrison
(Related: Artists, Writers)
"Writers can write outside their ethnicity or sex depending how open and vulnerable they wish to be."
- Jim Harrison
(Related: Sex, Open, Writers)
"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."
- Jim Harrison
(Related: Life, Advice, Wine, Writers)
"Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works."
- Jim Harrison
(Related: Publishing, Writers)
"But as a writer and performer, I want to get paid for what I do."
- Debbie Harry
(Related: Want, Writer)
"There's a statistical theory that if you gave a million monkeys typewriters and set them to work, they'd eventually come up with the complete works of Shakespeare. Thanks to the Internet, we now know this isn't true."
- Ian Hart
(Related: Work, Internet, Now, Shakespeare, Theory)
"Painters of paintings, writers of books, never could tell the half."
- Lorenz Hart
(Related: Books, Writers)
"My father was a writer and an acting teacher."
- Noah Hathaway
(Related: Father, Acting, Writer)
"Sometimes writers say true things about the overall nature of publicity, promotion, and the publishing industry; but alas, not always."
- Teresa Nielsen Hayden
(Related: Nature, Promotion, Publicity, Publishing, Writers)
"Writers say many true things about their own experiences with publicity and promotion."
- Teresa Nielsen Hayden
(Related: Promotion, Publicity, Writers)
"I was never a quick writer, but composed with great care and efforts."
- Joseph Haydn
(Related: Care, Quick, Writer)
"But when I did think about it and looked at the whole package - the producers behind the show, the writers, the cast I would be working with - I would have been a fool to turn it down just because the role for me was another gay role."
- Sean Hayes
(Related: Fool, Gay, Writers)
"The writers have slowly taken the show, with subjects other gay shows have dived right into, slowly. It was over a year before Will even started to date."
- Sean Hayes
(Related: Gay, Right, Will, Writers)
"I think for writers who write that kind of stuff, they want to make changes. Look at Kris Kristofferson and Dylan. I mean, whole generations come along liking that stuff and that's great."
- Lee Hazlewood
(Related: Generations, Want, Writers)
"As writers and readers, as sinners and citizens, our realism and our aesthetic sense make us wary of crediting the positive note."
- Seamus Heaney
(Related: Positive, Realism, Sense, Writers)
"The time of illusion, then, is the beautiful moment of passion; it represents the artistic zone in which the poet or romance writer ought to be free to do the very best that he can."
- Lafcadio Hearn
(Related: Time, Romance, Illusion, Passion, Writer, Zone)
"The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects."
- Lafcadio Hearn
(Related: Romance, Difficulty, Writer)
"It's a little bit in the genes because my brother is a journalist and my father was a sports writer."
- Patricia Heaton
(Related: Sports, Father, Brother, Writer)
"I discovered early in my movie work that a movie is never any better than the stupidest man connected with it. There are times when this distinction may be given to the writer or director. Most often it belongs to the producer."
- Ben Hecht
(Related: Work, Man, May, Writer)
"I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain."
- Ben Hecht
(Related: Sports, Hollywood, Writer)
"There is no way that writers can be tamed and rendered civilized or even cured. The only solution known to science is to provide the patient with an isolation room, where he can endure the acute stages in private and where food can be poked in to him with a stick."
- Robert A. Heinlein
(Related: Food, Science, Isolation, Solution, Writers)
"Every writer I know has trouble writing."
- Joseph Heller
(Related: Trouble, Writer, Writing)
"They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves."
- Lillian Hellman
(Related: Advice, Fancy, Talking, Writers, Writing)
"If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves."
- Lillian Hellman
(Related: Advice, Talking, Writers, Writing)
"If a writer knows enough about what he is writing about, he may omit things that he knows. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one ninth of it being above water."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: Being, Dignity, May, Water, Writer, Writing)
"The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: Life, May, Writer)
"There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: Events, Invention, Obligation, Writer)
"There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: Nothing, Writing)
"When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: People, Character, Living, Writer, Writing)
"A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl."
- Ernest Hemingway
(Related: May, Writer)
"Next to the writer of real estate advertisements, the autobiographer is the most suspect of prose artists."
- Donal Henahan
(Related: Artists, Prose, Writer)
"I just hate to be in one corner. I hate to be put as only a guitar player, or either only as a songwriter, or only as a tap dancer. I like to move around."
- Jimi Hendrix
(Related: Guitar, Hate)
"But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright."
- Beth Henley
"Sometimes songwriters and singers forget that. They get a melody in their head and the notes will take precedence, so that they wind up forcing a word onto a melody. It doesn't ring true."
- Don Henley
(Related: Forget, Will, Wind, Word)
"What I always meant by that was that I do believe that a lot of directors, and writers, and sometimes producers just lose their edge because they haven't seen anybody or talked to anybody or been with anybody who isn't a kind of replica of themselves for a long period of time."
- Buck Henry
(Related: Time, Writers)
"Many artists and writers have used cannabis for creative stimulation - from the writers of the world's religious masterpieces to our most irreverent satirists."
- Jack Herer
(Related: Artists, Religious, World, Writers)
"The main advantage of the omniscient approach is that it's the easiest to handle. That's the major reason so many writers select it."
- Arthur Herzog
(Related: Reason, Writers)
"I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone."
- Patricia Highsmith
(Related: Dream, Want, Writers)
"I was in New York. Hitchcock was in California. He rang me to make a report on his progress and said, I'm having trouble. I've just sacked my second screenwriter."
- Patricia Highsmith
(Related: Progress, Trouble)
"Nashville is one of the greatest places for the best songwriters in the world. It's been fantastic to live there and to raise our family there. It's a great town."
- Faith Hill
(Related: Family, World)
"I wouldn't not want to be a director and write as I wouldn't not to want to be a writer and direct movies."
- Walter Hill
(Related: Movies, Want, Writer)
"Since signing with Universal, I have been working closely with Gary Ross, the director, producer and screenwriter. We have spent many hours on the phone, and I've been sending him information and items that have been useful to the writing process."
- Laura Hillenbrand
(Related: Information, Writing)
"I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen."
- Laura Hillenbrand
(Related: Work, Creativity, Fiction, Infinite, Potential, Writer, Writing)
"For me, being a writer was never a choice. I was born one. All through my childhood I wrote short stories and stuffed them in drawers. I wrote on everything. I didn't do my homework so I could write."
- Laura Hillenbrand
(Related: Being, Childhood, Choice, Writer)
"I am amazed; until the day I die I shall wonder how Whittaker Chambers got into my house to use my typewriter."
- Alger Hiss
(Related: Day, Wonder)
"In the future the way that Whittaker Chambers was able to carry out forgery by typewriter will be disclosed."
- Alger Hiss
(Related: Future, Will)
"My friends tend to be writers. I think writers and painters are really all the same-we just sit in our rooms."
- Howard Hodgkin
(Related: Friends, Writers)
"I've been a screenwriter for twenty-five years. Every one of my books have been optioned for movies and I have written a few of those screenplays."
- Alice Hoffman
(Related: Movies, Books, Years)
"I feel more influenced in my own work by dreams than I do by other writers' works in a way. Or by popular culture, movies - what else is there to write about than love and loss?"
- Alice Hoffman
(Related: Dreams, Love, Movies, Work, Culture, Loss, Popular, Writers)
"I went on a long trip through South America with Prince Charles where I was the only journalist there - a couple of photographers but no other writers."
- Anthony Holden
(Related: America, Writers)
"The truth is, I initially became a singer-songwriter while still in my teens because it was the only way to guarantee that somebody on earth would sing the songs I was writing. Since then, I've performed just about everywhere: rock clubs, concerts halls, arenas, TV."
- Rupert Holmes
(Related: Truth, Earth, Songs, Writing)
"I'm so disturbed when my women students behave as though they can only read women, or black students behave as though they can only read blacks, or white students behave as though they can only identify with a white writer."
- Bell Hooks
(Related: Women, Students, Writer)
"I have always been a writer of letters, and of long ones; so, when I first thought of writing a book in the form of letters, I knew that I could do it quickly and easily."
- Laurence Housman
(Related: Thought, First, Letters, Writer, Writing)
"Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer. But why? Why do you choose one set of tools rather than another?"
- James D. Houston
(Related: Tools, Words, Writer)
"Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer."
- James Houston
(Related: Tools, Words, Writer)
"It seems to me that many writers, by virtue of environments of culture, art and education, slip into writing because of their environments."
- Robert E. Howard
(Related: Art, Education, Virtue, Culture, Writers, Writing)
"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."
- Robert E. Howard
(Related: Advice, Writers, Writing)
"I became a writer in spite of my environments."
- Robert E. Howard
(Related: Writer)
"But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer."
- Robert E. Howard
(Related: Failure, First, Living, Man, Profession, Writer)
"Never the less, at the age of fifteen, having never seen a writer, a poet, a publisher or a magazine editor, and having only the vaguest ideas of procedure, I began working on the profession I had chosen."
- Robert E. Howard
(Related: Age, Ideas, Profession, Writer)
"We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line."
- Langston Hughes
(Related: Being, Censorship, Writers)
"Depending on what I'm working on, I come to the writing desk with entirely different mindsets. When I change form one to the other, it's as if another writer is on the scene."
- Evan Hunter
(Related: Change, Writer, Writing)
"I think writers, by nature, are more observers instead of participators."
- Ian Hunter
(Related: Nature, Writers)
"I was notified on July 17 to be ready to start August 7 for an October air date. When we reached the screen we did not have a single segment ready. It was done so fast the writers never got a chance to know what it was all about."
- Jeffrey Hunter
(Related: Chance, July, October, Writers)
"Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing."
- Fannie Hurst
(Related: Name, Worth, Writer)
"Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves."
- Aldous Huxley
(Related: Influence, Writers)
"The so-called feminist writers were disgusted with me. I did my thing, and so I guess by feminist standards I'm a feminist. That suits me fine."
- Chrissie Hynde
(Related: Writers)
"Going off the road just leaves me more time to be a writer."
- Janis Ian
(Related: Time, Road, Writer)
"Some scientists use TeX or LatEX but for most people Word is the thing that writers use these days."
- Miguel de Icaza
(Related: People, Scientists, Word, Writers)
"I think the special thing about Python is that it's a writers' commune. The writers are in charge. The writers decide what the material is."
- Eric Idle
(Related: Writers)
"I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Censorship, Writers)
"I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Writer)
"I believe that writers, unless they consider themselves terribly exquisite, are at heart people who live by night, a little bit outside society, moving between delinquency and conformity."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Society, People, Heart, Conformity, Night, Writers)
"I am the only British writer who writes in Spanish."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Writer)
"You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Forget, Pen, Struggle, Words)
"Writers rush in where publishers fear to tread and where translators fear to tread."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Fear, Writers)
"What I do believe is that there is always a relationship between writing and reading, a constant interplay between the writer on the one hand and the reader on the other."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Reading, Writer, Writing)
"Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Choice, Country, Writer)
"The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Writer)
"I think writers rush in where everybody is very frightened to tread."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Writers)
"I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Writer, Writers)
"But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Mind, Writer)
"A very wise author once said that a writer writes for himself, and then publishes for money. I write for myself and publish just for the reader."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Money, Writer)
"I am a writer of fragments."
- Guillermo Cabrera Infante
(Related: Writer)
"In many ways, Viv and I were the only ones who were really songwriters."
- Neil Innes
"And I find - I'm 63, and my capacity to be by myself and just spend time by myself hasn't diminished any. That's the necessary part of being a writer, you better like being alone."
- John Irving
(Related: Time, Being, Writer)
"I have pretty thick skin, and I think if you're going to be in this business, if you're going to be an actor or a writer, you better have a thick skin."
- John Irving
(Related: Business, Actor, Pretty, Skin, Writer)
"More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina."
- John Irving
(Related: Life, Talent, Writer)
"There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly."
- John Irving
(Related: Necessity, Reason, Writer)
"As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened."
- Kazuo Ishiguro
(Related: People, Writer)
"I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff."
- Kazuo Ishiguro
(Related: Fiction, Songs, Writer, Writing)
"What is difficult is the promotion, balancing the public side of a writer's life with the writing. I think that's something a lot of writers are having to face. Writers have become much more public now."
- Kazuo Ishiguro
(Related: Life, Now, Promotion, Public, Writer, Writers, Writing)
"There's a practical problem about time and energy, and a more subtle problem of what it does to a writer's head, to continually analyze why they write, where it all comes from, where it's going to."
- Kazuo Ishiguro
(Related: Time, Energy, Writer)
"Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write."
- Kazuo Ishiguro
(Related: Dreams, Travel, Books, Care, Friends, Journalism, Writer)
"I'm a schoolteacher and a writer. So that's what I do."
- Bruce Jackson
(Related: Writer)
"You have to pretend to live in those clothes that they lived in, to live within the climate that they had then. You have to imagine with the help, obviously, of all the other technicians that are around - the writer, the director, the other actors."
- Derek Jacobi
(Related: Actors, Climate, Clothes, Help, Writer)
"No writer should minimize the factor that affects everyone, but is beyond control: luck."
- John Jakes
(Related: Luck, Writer)
"I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme."
- Henry James
(Related: Love, Writer)
"I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema."
- Jim Jarmusch
(Related: Cinema, Writer, Writing)
"As is said about most writers: on the one hand all I ever did from when I was a child was read, and I was a loner, which was furthered by my parents and my upbringing."
- Elfriede Jelinek
(Related: Parents)
"My sensibility steers me toward writers who are out on their own."
- Tahar Ben Jelloun
(Related: Sensibility, Writers)
"We do not have many intellectuals who can speak out for us internationally. We have no writers who are recognized, respected and loved outside the Arab world."
- Tahar Ben Jelloun
(Related: Intellectuals, World, Writers)
"I am a Moroccan writer of French expression."
- Tahar Ben Jelloun
(Related: Expression, Writer)
"I belong to a specific category of writers, those who speak and write in a language different from that of their parents."
- Tahar Ben Jelloun
(Related: Language, Parents, Writers)
"Writers write. Dreamers talk about it."
- Jerry B. Jenkins
(Related: Talk, Writers)
"I learned that the only way you are going to get anywhere in life is to work hard at it. Whether you're a musician, a writer, an athlete or a businessman, there is no getting around it. If you do, you'll win - if you don't, you won't."
- Bruce Jenner
(Related: Life, Work, Writer)
"Artist - musicians, painters, writers, poets, always seem to have had the most accurate perception of what is really going on around them, not the official version or the popular perception of contemporary life."
- Billy Joel
(Related: Life, Perception, Artist, Musicians, Poets, Popular, Writers)
"I consider myself to be an inept pianist, a bad singer, and a merely competent songwriter. What I do, in my opinion, is by no means extraordinary."
- Billy Joel
(Related: Opinion)
"A novel's whole pattern is rarely apparent at the outset of writing, or even at the end; that is when the writer finds out what a novel is about, and the job becomes one of understanding and deepening or sharpening what is already written. That is finding the theme."
- Diane Johnson
(Related: End, Job, Understanding, Writer, Writing)
"A writer's work often reflects what he or she has been exposed to in life; experiences which are the groundwork of a poem or a story."
- Eyvind Johnson
(Related: Work, Life, Writer)
"It is my desire to be a great writer. I know that I still have a mountain to climb to achieve that."
- Guy Johnson
(Related: Desire, Writer)
"I hope to be with you as a writer for a very long time, and I hope that you will enjoy reading my work, because readers are the highest form of life on this planet."
- Guy Johnson
(Related: Life, Time, Work, Hope, Reading, Will, Writer)
"The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book."
- Samuel Johnson
(Related: Time, Man, Order, Reading, Will, Writer)
"Disney was not a good animator, he didn't draw well at all, but he was always a great idea man, and a good writer."
- Chuck Jones
(Related: Idea, Disney, Man, Writer)
"An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory."
- Franklin P. Jones
(Related: Autobiography, Memory, Nothing, Writer)
"When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration."
- Howard Mumford Jones
(Related: Thought, American, Excellence, Writer)
"No one ever found wisdom without also being a fool. Writers, alas, have to be fools in public, while the rest of the human race can cover its tracks."
- Erica Jong
(Related: Wisdom, Being, Fool, Fools, Public, Race, Rest, Writers)
"I do enjoy working with writers."
- Neil Jordan
(Related: Writers)
"Never write anything that does not give you great pleasure. Emotion is easily transferred from the writer to the reader."
- Joseph Joubert
(Related: Emotion, Pleasure, Writer)
"And of course there's so much music in and around our family. I had a piano during Christmas because it's obviously useful through the season. There are so many people, songwriters, who are around."
- Ashley Judd
(Related: Music, Family, People, Christmas)
"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."
- Norton Juster
(Related: Books, Writers)
"Writers speak stench."
- Franz Kafka
(Related: Writers)
"He sometimes ran a purple ribbon through his typewriter and gushed where he should have dammed."
- T. E. Kalem
"It hurt me a great deal. It put a lot of pressure on me because I was at a young age and the writers around here and throughout the league starting comparing me to Cobb. It put a lot of pressure on me."
- Al Kaline
(Related: Age, Hurt, Pressure, Writers)
"The trouble with being a ghostwriter or artist is that you must remain rather anonymously without credit. If one wants the credit, one has to cease being a ghost and become a leader or innovator."
- Bob Kane
(Related: Leader, Artist, Being, Credit, Trouble)
"I am also a writer. That is a fact not known by the public in general."
- Bob Kane
(Related: Fact, Public, Writer)
"Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Business, Computer, Lonely, Words, Writers, Writing)
"This sort of encouragement is vital for any writer. And lastly the publication of Touching the Flame, which was on hold for two years and went through a few publishers before finding a stable home."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Home, Encouragement, Writer, Years)
"Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Work, Word, Writer)
"Some writers would be kinder than others, I'm sure. Hopefully they might describe my techniques as a mixture of tried and tested formulas - if it aint broke don't fix it - and unexpected twists."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Writers)
"As for goals, I don't set myself those anymore. I'm not one of these 'I must have achieved this and that by next year' kind of writers. I take things as they come and find that patience and persistence tend to win out in the end."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Goals, End, Patience, Persistence, Writers)
"Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Time, Thought, Fiction, Today, Writer)
"I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can't be like any other author's really."
- Paul Kane
(Related: Fiction, Personality, Respect, Writers, Writing)
"Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life."
- Lawrence Kasdan
(Related: Life, Being, Night, Rest, Writer)
"I read, therefore I'm interested in writers."
- Philip Kaufman
(Related: Writers)
"The writer, when he is also an artist, is someone who admits what others don't dare reveal."
- Elia Kazan
(Related: Artist, Writer)
"When a writer talks about his work, he's talking about a love affair."
- Alfred Kazin
(Related: Love, Work, Talking, Writer)
"It's commonly said that people who've been ill in childhood and who've had an upset education never really regret that they do. It means that you don't look at the world in the way that other people do, and if you were inclined to be a writer, that's a help."
- John Keegan
(Related: Education, People, Childhood, Help, Regret, World, Writer)
"I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop."
- Clarence Budington Kelland
"I don't practice, but I am still officially in paediatrics. I keep in touch with journals, and I have a very good data bank of medical information and there is a key thing for a writer knowing where to go. I know where to go to get the information that I need."
- Jonathan Kellerman
(Related: Medical, Information, Key, Practice, Writer)
"That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing."
- Jonathan Kellerman
(Related: Money, Reason, Want, Writers, Writing)
"Chemistry is not anything an executive producer or writer can orchestrate or plan; you just hope for it."
- David E. Kelley
(Related: Hope, Writer)
"And I definitely wanted to be a writer, but I felt a duty now, having used up those educational resources, I felt a duty to the church and my parents to become a priest."
- Thomas Keneally
(Related: Church, Duty, Now, Parents, Writer)
"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."
- Thomas Keneally
(Related: Being, Children, Memories, Writers)
"I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did."
- Thomas Keneally
(Related: Thought, Writer)
"I always wanted to be some kind of writer or newspaper reporter. But after college... I did other things."
- Jackie Kennedy
(Related: College, Writer)
"People are always saying that I must have been the class clown, with all these voices. No, I was way too shy to be the class clown; I was a class clown's writer."
- Tom Kenny
(Related: People, Class, Saying, Writer)
"Nothing spooky or terrible happened on set, but we were told to say it had. We were giving a press conference and the writers were going on about these terrible things that supposedly happened while we were filming."
- Margot Kidder
(Related: Giving, Nothing, Press, Writers)
"Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living."
- Tracy Kidder
(Related: Being, Living, Writer)
"My parents thought it was nice to develop my imagination, but they never seriously thought that anything would ever come of it. They said that I couldn't be an actress because I would be taller than all my leading men, so I thought I would be a writer instead."
- Nicole Kidman
(Related: Imagination, Men, Thought, Leading, Parents, Writer)
"The writers I respect the most had an undying commitment to a vision."
- Jewel Kilcher
(Related: Vision, Commitment, Respect, Writers)
"I'm a songwriter first."
- Carole King
(Related: First)
"I think there are some songwriters who are just brilliant who can write and then I think there are some songwriters who can like me I have a problem writing chorus lyrics but I can write a song in a story like that."
- Charles King
(Related: Song, Writing)
"Writers who have nothing to say always strain for metaphors to say it in."
- Florence King
(Related: Metaphors, Nothing, Writers)
"Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide."
- Larry King
(Related: Business, Eyes, Saying, World, Writers)
"All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour."
- Ben Kingsley
(Related: Writers)
"Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do."
- Robert Kirkman
(Related: Books, Writer)
"We served on the editorial board of a literary monthly called Face in 1968 and 1969. He was a young writer, and I was also interested in broad cultural issues. We agreed on all major issues and became friends."
- Vaclav Klaus
(Related: Friends, Literary, Writer)
"The biggest problem in rock journalism is that often the writer's main motivation is to become friends with the band. They're not really journalists; they're people who want to be involved in rock and roll."
- Chuck Klosterman
(Related: Motivation, People, Friends, Journalism, Want, Writer)
"Anyone who claims to be good at lying is obviously bad at lying. Thus - as a writer myself - I cannot comment on whether or not writers are exceptionally good liars, because whatever I said would actually mean its complete opposite."
- Chuck Klosterman
(Related: Lying, Writer, Writers)
"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."
- Chuck Klosterman
(Related: People, Committee, Voice, Worry, Writers)
"You get to Hollywood and you are in the land of big money where they don't like to see only one screenwriter's name. It's much better if you've got four or five."
- Nigel Kneale
(Related: Money, Hollywood, Land, Name)
"The writer who can't do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won't dream of sharing his royalties with that editor."
- Alfred A. Knopf
(Related: Dream, Job, Sharing, Writer)
"I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows."
- Edward Koch
(Related: First, Windows, Writers)
"I'm a writer who likes to be influenced."
- Kenneth Koch
(Related: Writer)
"As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is."
- Kenneth Koch
(Related: Time, Work, Identity, May, Writer)
"A writer's ambition should be to trade a hundred contemporary readers for ten readers in ten years' time and for one reader in a hundred years' time."
- Arthur Koestler
(Related: Time, Ambition, Trade, Writer, Years)
"Although I've said a million times that I'm not a horror writer, I do like horror."
- Dean Koontz
(Related: Horror, Writer)
"If something in your writing gives support to people in their lives, that's more than just entertainment-which is what we writers all struggle to do, to touch people."
- Dean Koontz
(Related: People, Entertainment, Struggle, Support, Writers, Writing)
"Gatherings and, simultaneously, loneliness are the conditions of a writer's life."
- Jerzy Kosinski
(Related: Life, Loneliness, Writer)
"Sylvester has a great popular sense, as good as any writer I've ever worked with. He knows what audiences want to see, and what they don't want to see."
- Ted Kotcheff
(Related: Audiences, Popular, Sense, Want, Writer)
"I think one of the coolest things about the job is the level of trust we have for each other. The actors fully trust that the writers will write amazing episodes, and the writers trust that the actors will follow their instincts with the characters."
- John Krasinski
(Related: Trust, Actors, Job, Will, Writers)
"Journalist: a person without any ideas but with an ability to express them; a writer whose skill is improved by a deadline: the more time he has, the worse he writes."
- Karl Kraus
(Related: Time, Ideas, Ability, Skill, Writer)
"A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer."
- Karl Kraus
(Related: Writer)
"Four years earlier I had been selected, with Kay Boyle, the writer, and a number of others, to go to Cambodia and come back and prove that there were no sanctuaries in that country."
- William Kunstler
(Related: Country, Writer, Years)
"I could tell you which writer's rhythms I am imitating. It's not exactly plagiarism, it's falling in love with good language and trying to imitate it."
- Charles Kuralt
(Related: Love, Language, Plagiarism, Trying, Writer)
"I turned down twelve films last year... Huge money films, but I had no respect for the writer or the work."
- Shia LaBeouf
(Related: Money, Work, Respect, Writer)
"I would be more frightened as a writer if people thought my movies were like science fiction."
- Neil LaBute
(Related: Movies, Science, Thought, People, Fiction, Writer)
"Home base is the support system where we have a culinary team, my own writers because of the shows and the books and stuff, we have a culinary team of about six people. Marketing, public relations, accounting and all that sort of stuff."
- Emeril Lagasse
(Related: Home, People, Books, Marketing, Public, Support, Writers)
"New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God."
- Tim LaHaye
(Related: God, People, Being, Fiction, Writers)
"And then I met Jerry and he's such a creative fiction writer, and I don't know if there's ever been a team put together the way we are - where one person does the theological way out and suggestions, and the other person goes into the cave and does the fiction writing."
- Tim LaHaye
(Related: Fiction, Writer, Writing)
"I came to the conclusion that I am not a fiction writer."
- Tim LaHaye
(Related: Fiction, Writer)
"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."
- Wally Lamb
(Related: Fiction, May, Pretty, Writers, Writing)
"No writer of a portion of the Bible was perfect. It was the direct and miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit that what they wrote is without mistake."
- Walter Lang
(Related: Mistake, Bible, Spirit, Writer)
"A good many young writers make the mistake of enclosing a stamped, self-addressed envelope, big enough for the manuscript to come back in. This is too much of a temptation to the editor."
- Ring Lardner
(Related: Mistake, Self, Temptation, Writers)
"The prophets and the writers of the Psalms were clear that God was continuing to work in the universe and in all history. They declared that He had created the universe."
- Kenneth Scott Latourette
(Related: Work, History, God, Universe, Writers)
"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."
- James Laughlin
(Related: Writer, Writers)
"Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors."
- James Laughlin
(Related: Writer)
"To me the only real star of the movie is the writer. And I work with writers very closely, from outline to first draft and on to the seventh draft, whatever it takes. Then my job is to support the director to make the best movie we can. Some producers try to go past them, but my job is to support them."
- Dino De Laurentiis
(Related: Work, Draft, First, Job, Past, Support, Writer, Writers)
"It is setting goals and trying to be a business person, but at the same time not losing sight of who you are writing songs for and what your goals are as a songwriter. So believe me, if you think I've got it down I don't it is a constant struggle."
- Christine Lavin
(Related: Business, Time, Goals, Losing, Sight, Songs, Struggle, Trying, Writing)
"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."
- Norman Lear
(Related: Experience, Men, Women, Humor, Writers)
"Granted, the writers, directors, producers, and that community make a great deal of money. But they might be choosing to do a whole lot of other things for the living they make."
- Norman Lear
(Related: Money, Community, Living, Writers)
"You're in the business - when you're a writer, producer, director - to get ratings."
- Norman Lear
(Related: Business, Writer)
"Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche."
- Tanith Lee
(Related: Old, Practice, Writers)
"The other writer who had a very important early influence on me when I was about 17 was C.S. Lewis."
- Tanith Lee
(Related: Influence, Writer)
"At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer."
- Tanith Lee
(Related: School, Silly, Writer)
"I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault."
- Tanith Lee
(Related: Love, Beginning, Writers)
"I think writers are prone to hyperbole sometimes."
- John Legend
(Related: Writers)
"I think with every writer there are two people there."
- Hugh Leonard
(Related: People, Writer)
"I feel like the writer observing the grief, but it is difficult to be detached from it."
- Hugh Leonard
(Related: Grief, Writer)
"Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed."
- Hugh Leonard
(Related: Father, Writer)
"I'm a writer, and what I do is write. I wasn't able to do anything else."
- Hugh Leonard
(Related: Writer)
"I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer."
- Doris Lessing
(Related: Life, Work, Truth, Hard work, Writer, Writing)
"I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Books, Building, Luck, Result, Writers)
"What's lucky about my career in general is that I stumbled into what every writer most wants. Not repeating myself and doing strange things has become my trademark."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Career, Writer)
"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."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Father, Artist, Artists, Example, Friends, Parents, Writers)
"I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts."
- Jonathan Lethem
(Related: Writer)
"Well it was sent to me, well because almost everything that is written in Baltimore is sent to me. And David Simon, who was a writer for the Baltimore Sun, spent one year following the homicide squad in Baltimore and he chronicled that period of time."
- Barry Levinson
(Related: Time, Sun, Writer)
"I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show."
- Barry Levinson
(Related: Actor, Beginning, Television, Writer)
"Good writers are of necessity rare."
- George Henry Lewes
(Related: Necessity, Writers)
"Every compulsion is put upon writers to become safe, polite, obedient, and sterile."
- Sinclair Lewis
(Related: Writers)
"Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer."
- Georg C. Lichtenberg
(Related: Lie, Witty, Writer)
"A writer who presents men and women as creatures truncated below the waist is exposed as one who goes about without his trousers saying, 'see, I have had my testicles removed.'"
- Norman Lindsay
(Related: Men, Women, Saying, Writer)
"We are the only school in America, drama school in America that trains actors, writers and directors side by side for three years in a master's degree program, and we want them - to expose them to everything."
- James Lipton
(Related: Actors, America, Drama, School, Want, Writers, Years)
"Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm."
- Penelope Lively
(Related: Want, Writers)
"You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be."
- Mario Vargas Llosa
(Related: Creativity, Help, Writer)
"If you are killed because you are a writer, that's the maximum expression of respect, you know."
- Mario Vargas Llosa
(Related: Expression, Respect, Writer)
"But if you have a point of view and you're an artist or a writer, it's kind of crazy to not take advantage of that, especially if you can do something that's entertaining as well. I've done a number of things like that over the years."
- David Lloyd
(Related: Artist, Writer, Years)
"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."
- David Lloyd
(Related: Art, Artists, Therapy, Victims, Writers)
"I do like to work on a Marvel method, so if I've got the opportunity, and the writer is happy to do it, I like to have a writer detail what happens on a page, but not saying what happens in every scene."
- David Lloyd
(Related: Work, Opportunity, Detail, Saying, Writer)
"Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in."
- Kurt Loder
(Related: Style, Writer, Writing)
"And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it."
- Kurt Loder
(Related: Work, First, Will, Writer)
"My brother is an excellent songwriter, and I play guitar and drums."
- Jeremy London
(Related: Brother, Guitar, Play)
"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."
- Nia Long
(Related: Commitment, Order, Passion, Words, Writers)
"It used to bother me being portrayed as this bitchy person, but now I feel that the public understands me better than some writer. There are people who know who I really am, and that's good enough for me."
- Jennifer Lopez
(Related: People, Being, Now, Public, Writer)
"I feel I want to grow as an actress and be better. I want to progress as a singer and songwriter, and produce movies and everything. So there'll be no time when I feel I've done it all."
- Jennifer Lopez
(Related: Movies, Time, Progress, Want)
"Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism."
- Audre Lorde
(Related: Quality, Literary, Racism, Writers)
"I enjoyed hearing people do their own songs. I became attracted to singer-songwriters. I became interested in them as people; was curious about what they wanted to say."
- Lyle Lovett
(Related: People, Hearing, Songs)
"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."
- Ernst Lubitsch
(Related: Talent, Man, Name, Stars, Writers)
"Apart from a few simple principles, the sound and rhythm of English prose seem to me matters where both writers and readers should trust not so much to rules as to their ears."
- F. L. Lucas
(Related: Trust, English, Principles, Prose, Rules, Sound, Writers)
"Although I write screenplays, I don't think I'm a very good writer."
- George Lucas
(Related: Writer)
"Writers are in the entertainment business, and it gives me lots of pleasure to entertain my readers."
- Brian Lumley
(Related: Business, Entertainment, Pleasure, Writers)
"A literary critic is someone who can't write, but who loves to show he would have been a wonderful writer if only he could!"
- Brian Lumley
(Related: Literary, Writer)
"I should think just about every young writer - which I was at the time - would be influenced by HPL. As an American writer of weird fiction, he was at the top of the class."
- Brian Lumley
(Related: Time, American, Class, Fiction, Writer)
"And I have to consider myself fortunate, because there are plenty of writers who spend most of a lifetime looking for that certain something without ever finding it."
- Brian Lumley
(Related: Writers)
"Today it's almost impossible to do it unless you are an actress or writer with power... I wouldn't hesitate right this minute to hire a talented woman if the subject matter were right."
- Ida Lupino
(Related: Power, Right, Today, Woman, Writer)
"One of the most interesting aspects of the film project was collaborating with so many people - directors, filmmakers, and writers - over a five-year period. I learned that there are two components to this."
- Yo-Yo Ma
(Related: People, Film, Project, Writers)
"The first year we actually did a lot of night shooting and the writers weren't even allowed on location."
- James MacArthur
(Related: First, Night, Writers)
"When I was asked to be Writer in Residence at Edinburgh I thought, you can't teach poetry. This is ridiculous."
- Norman MacCaig
(Related: Poetry, Thought, Writer)
"Our principal writers have nearly all been fortunate in escaping regular education."
- Hugh MacDiarmid
(Related: Education, Writers)
"I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing."
- Alistair Maclean
(Related: Writer, Writing)
"You know, Mamet is not a huge writer of female parts. Most of his movies don't even have women in them, so I'm lucky I'm in it at all."
- Elle Macpherson
(Related: Movies, Women, Writer)
"It is one test of a fully developed writer that he reminds us of no one but himself."
- Melvin Maddocks
(Related: Writer)
"The writer interweaves a story with his own doubts, questions, and values. That is art."
- Naguib Mahfouz
(Related: Art, Values, Questions, Writer)
"It is simply not part of my culture to preserve notes. I have never heard of a writer preserving his early drafts."
- Naguib Mahfouz
(Related: Culture, Writer)
"I thought they would never select an Eastern writer for the Nobel. I was surprised."
- Naguib Mahfouz
(Related: Thought, Writer)
"I was a government employee in the morning and a writer in the evening."
- Naguib Mahfouz
(Related: Government, Evening, Writer)
"There are certainly times when my own everyday life seems to retreat so the life of the story can take me over. That is why a writer often needs space and time, so that he or she can abandon ordinary life and "live" with the characters."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Life, Time, Needs, Space, Writer)
"My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Work, Living, Night, Theory, Writer, Writers, Years)
"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."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Time, Books, Mind, Network, Opposition, Relationships, Writers)
"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."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Work, Character, Style, Writers, Writing)
"I had to wait for a long time before I could support myself with writing. However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be, from the time I was a child."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Time, Being, Support, Writer, Writing)
"Every writer has to find their own way into writing."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Writer, Writing)
"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."
- Margaret Mahy
(Related: Children, Writers)
"A writer is a spectator, looking at everything with a highly critical eye."
- Bernard Malamud
(Related: Eye, Writer)
"Almost every band has somebody who's the main songwriter and who has a vision, a very clear idea of how a song should be."
- Stephen Malkmus
(Related: Idea, Vision, Song)
"I used to want to be a children's writer, because I would have all these great ideas when I was little, and I'd write them and draw them, and turn them into class."
- Jena Malone
(Related: Ideas, Children, Class, Want, Writer)
"I do not know that any writer has supposed that on this earth man will ultimately be able to live without food."
- Thomas Malthus
(Related: Food, Earth, Man, Will, Writer)
"A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him."
- Thomas Malthus
(Related: Man, May, Will, Writer)
"The writer's language is to some degree the product of his own action; he is both the historian and the agent of his own language."
- Paul de Man
(Related: Action, Language, Writer)
"We were a very small circle of writers. Everybody brought to the table their own life experience."
- Howie Mandel
(Related: Experience, Life, Writers)
"I think that most writers who wait until they're inspired to write are just waiting for the fear to subside."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Fear, Waiting, Writers)
"One other thing, if it's possible, as songwriters, you should also develop yourself as record producers."
- Barry Mann
"Probably most successful songwriters have an innate songwriting ability."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Successful, Ability)
"There's so much fear involved in trying to do something you don't know how to do that drugs and alcohol can become a big part of your life if you have an addictive personality or are very unsure, which most songwriters are."
- Barry Mann
(Related: Life, Fear, Alcohol, Drugs, Personality, Trying)
"Of course the word chaos is used in rather a vague sense by a lot of writers, but in physics it means a particular phenomenon, namely that in a nonlinear system the outcome is often indefinitely, arbitrarily sensitive to tiny changes in the initial condition."
- Murray Gell Mann
(Related: Chaos, Physics, Sense, Word, Writers)
"The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea."
- Thomas Mann
(Related: Idea, Being, Writer)
"A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
- Thomas Mann
(Related: People, Writer, Writing)
"The writer's joy is the thought that can become emotion, the emotion that can wholly become a thought."
- Thomas Mann
(Related: Thought, Emotion, Joy, Writer)
"I'm a writer first and a woman after."
- Katherine Mansfield
(Related: First, Woman, Writer)
"Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated."
- Patrick Marber
(Related: Writer)
"The homosexual community wants me to be gay. The heterosexual community wants me to be straight. Every writer thinks, I'm the journalist who's going to make him talk. I pray for them. I pray that they get a life and stop living mine!"
- Ricky Martin
(Related: Life, Community, Gay, Living, Talk, Writer)
"The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money."
- Karl Marx
(Related: Money, Purpose, Order, Writer)
"The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it."
- Karl Marx
(Related: History, May, Writer)
"As a songwriter, there's nothing better than winning Song Of The Year. But I couldn't really celebrate, because it wasn't right. Luther wasn't standing next to me, to receive the award."
- Richard Marx
(Related: Winning, Nothing, Right, Song)
"The trouble with young writers is that they are all in their sixties."
- W. Somerset Maugham
(Related: Trouble, Writers)
"The writer is more concerned to know than to judge."
- W. Somerset Maugham
(Related: Writer)
"The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes."
- W. Somerset Maugham
(Related: Prose, Writer)
"It's very hard to be a gentleman and a writer."
- W. Somerset Maugham
(Related: Gentleman, Writer)
"It may interest you to know that my breakup with Terry and this mystery did not happen concurrently in real life. That is a writer's device, which places Gabriel under even greater pressure when the mystery begins to reveal itself."
- Armistead Maupin
(Related: Life, Interest, May, Mystery, Pressure, Writer)
"I can't imagine a more fulfilling thing for a writer than that you've made a strong impact on the lives of other people. Just because I've heard it before does not mean I don't want to hear it one more time."
- Armistead Maupin
(Related: Time, People, Want, Writer)
"Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard."
- Daphne du Maurier
(Related: Writers)
"Women writers have been told, forever, that our stories were not valuable. Not as valuable as men's stories about wars, business, power."
- Joyce Maynard
(Related: Power, Women, Business, Writers)
"Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals."
- Joyce Maynard
(Related: Being, Literary, Writer)
"First person narrative is a very effective tool but you have to know as a writer how to make it work."
- James McBride
(Related: Work, First, Writer)
"I think writers need windows on a view to remind them that a whole world is out there, not the minutiae with which they might be dealing on a close scale."
- Anne McCaffrey
(Related: Windows, World, Writers)
"I wouldn't encourage new writers to start off publishing through electronic media... it still isn't wide enough for the readership they would need to get a good start."
- Anne McCaffrey
(Related: Media, Publishing, Writers)
"The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it."
- Anne McCaffrey
(Related: Emotion, Right, Will, Writer)
"I didn't raise Todd to be a writer, but he happened to be one anyway."
- Anne McCaffrey
(Related: Writer)
"Some of the greatest writers in our industry can't get work."
- Kent McCord
(Related: Work, Writers)
"There's a feminist writer, Naomi Wolfe, who is reconsidering her position on abortion."
- Norma McCorvey
(Related: Abortion, Writer)
"It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice."
- Colleen McCullough
(Related: Character, Voice, Writer)
"I have an editor in my head, that's why I can't read Harry Potter, because Rowling is such a lousy writer."
- Colleen McCullough
(Related: Writer)
"One of my first jobs was at the Boston Globe. I worked in the sports department six months a year. When I was ready to graduate, the sports editor gave me a job as a schoolboy sports writer."
- Will McDonough
(Related: Sports, Boston, First, Job, Jobs, Months, Writer)
"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."
- Reba McEntire
(Related: Home, Idea, Network, Writers)
"I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world."
- John McGahern
(Related: Difference, World, Writer)
"The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear."
- Bryant H. McGill
(Related: Talent, Writer)
"Yes, you can feel very alone as a poet and you sometimes think, is it worth it? Is it worth carrying on? But because there were other poets, you became part of a scene. Even though they were very different writers, it made it easier because you were together."
- Roger McGough
(Related: Poets, Worth, Writers)
"I know great songwriters. Fred Neil would come up when he was in L.A., we all used to hang out. He would sit there and sing, and we would just melt. I mean, we would go to his recording sessions."
- Barry McGuire
"To have a songwriter that wrote so specifically what I felt to be true... I've never been much of an actor either. If something is real for me, then I can do it."
- Barry McGuire
(Related: Actor)
"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."
- Donald McKay
(Related: Time, Exercise, Words, Writers)
"I've been a writer for 42 years and, yes, it is a full time job for me. Not a hobby, but serious work."
- Donald McKay
(Related: Time, Work, Job, Writer, Years)
"Whenever I fill out the job description I put 'songwriter,' never 'singer' or 'artist.' Singers come and go."
- Brian McKnight
(Related: Job)
"I write music all the time. When I talk about having writer's block, it's more to do with lyrics than anything else."
- Sarah McLachlan
(Related: Music, Time, Talk, Writer)
"A typewriter is a means of transcribing thought, not expressing it."
- Marshall McLuhan
(Related: Thought)
"Few writers are willing to admit writing is autobiographical."
- Terry McMillan
(Related: Writers, Writing)
"I'm a fast writer."
- Terry McMillan
(Related: Writer)
"It's my responsibility as a singer-songwriter to report the news."
- John Mellencamp
(Related: News, Responsibility)
"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."
- Christopher Meloni
(Related: Thought, First, Irish, Sky, Writers)
"How that works is our first season was the year we had a threatened writers' strike, so what we did was that instead of doing 22 episodes, we did 30. We put 10 in the bank."
- Christopher Meloni
(Related: First, Writers)
"I still can't quite believe it. Although there was something about the fact that it was a first-time writer, a first-time producer, and a first-time director all at the same time."
- Sam Mendes
(Related: Time, Fact, First, Writer)
"I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular "ism," but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence."
- John Metcalf
(Related: Excellence, Literature, Lust, Press, Writers)
"Writers don't have to keep themselves honest. They have to keep themselves accurate."
- John Metcalf
(Related: Writers)
"As a writer, you have control of the words you put on the page. But once that manuscript leaves your hand, you give control to the reader. As a director, you are limited by everything: weather, budget, and egos."
- Nicholas Meyer
(Related: Control, Weather, Words, Writer)
"The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination."
- James A. Michener
(Related: Experience, Imagination, People, Writers)
"Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression."
- James A. Michener
(Related: Idea, America, Country, Expression, France, Germany, Russia, Writers)
"I was brought up in the great tradition of the late nineteenth century: that a writer never complains, never explains and never disdains."
- James A. Michener
(Related: Tradition, Writer)
"I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter."
- James A. Michener
(Related: Writer)
"I have come to understand and appreciate writers much more recently since I started working on a book last fall. Before that, I thought golf writers got up every morning, played a round of golf, had lunch, showed up for our last three holes and then went to dinner."
- Phil Mickelson
(Related: Thought, Golf, Writers)
"No, you're either born a writer, a storyteller, or you're not."
- John Milius
(Related: Writer)
"You know you lose a lot of social skills if you're a writer. You spend too long alone. And its forced me to address that."
- Anthony Minghella
(Related: Writer)
"Fortunately, John Houseman is a marvelous writer and he sat in on so many story conferences. He worked with Welles, you know, and he's a marvelous man."
- Vincente Minnelli
(Related: Man, Writer)
"To be a dramatic writer takes hard work, talent, and discipline. And that's why I just make up crap."
- Colin Mochrie
(Related: Work, Talent, Discipline, Hard work, Writer)
"Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be."
- Mary Wortley Montagu
(Related: Time, Men, Romance, Money, Loss, Manners, Writers)
"It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more."
- Rick Moody
(Related: Now, World, Writer)
"So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions."
- Rick Moody
(Related: Funny, Books, Emotions, Want, Writer)
"When a person responds emotionally to intellectual things, or emotionally only to traditional emotional things - I find that an interesting break between myself and some other writers and fans."
- Elizabeth Moon
(Related: Fans, Writers)
"When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you."
- Brian Moore
(Related: Work, Writer)
"If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist."
- Marianne Moore
(Related: Artist, Doubt, Interest, Writer)
"Any writer overwhelmingly honest about pleasing himself is almost sure to please others."
- Marianne Moore
(Related: Writer)
"A writer is unfair to himself when he is unable to be hard on himself."
- Marianne Moore
(Related: Writer)
"Actors are good liars; writers are good liars with good memories."
- Daniel Keys Moran
(Related: Actors, Memories, Writers)
"Writers, all the good ones, are Natural Born Liars."
- Daniel Keys Moran
(Related: Writers)
"Good writers are monotonous, like good composers. They keep trying to perfect the one problem they were born to understand."
- Alberto Moravia
(Related: Composers, Trying, Writers)
"Together with script writers Syd green and Dick Hills, we worked on the comedy ideas for this series."
- Eric Morecambe
(Related: Ideas, Comedy, Writers)
"Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Poetry, Values, Famous, Sense, Writers)
"Some people want to call me an Appalachian writer, even though I know some people use regional labels to belittle."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: People, Want, Writer)
"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."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Poetry, Decision, Prose, Reading, Writers)
"Young writers find their first audience in little magazines, and experimental writers find their only audience there."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: First, Writers)
"Young writers only take off when they find their subjects. Since almost everyone has a family and stories about family, that is often a place to start."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Family, Writers)
"I tell students they will know they are getting somewhere when a scene is so painful they can just barely bring themselves to write about it. A writer has to draw blood."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Blood, Students, Will, Writer)
"I don't think poetry is something that can be taught. We can encourage young writers, but what you can't teach them is the very essence of poetry."
- Robert Morgan
(Related: Poetry, Writers)
"If a lecturer, he wishes to be heard; if a writer, to be read. He always hopes for a public beyond that of the long-suffering wife."
- Samuel E. Morison
(Related: Wife, Public, Wishes, Writer)
"What I try to keep in mind is that there are going to be a lot of articles that are going to be misrepresentative of what I'm about as a person and as a writer."
- Alanis Morissette
(Related: Mind, Writer)
"Too many of these writers in the music papers, they are misunderstanding everything. The disco sound is not art or anything so serious."
- Giorgio Moroder
(Related: Art, Music, Sound, Writers)
"When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it."
- Willie Morris
(Related: Home, Heart, Writer)
"Some Native American writers enjoy being called Native American writers."
- Toni Morrison
(Related: American, Being, Writers)
"The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power."
- Toni Morrison
(Related: Power, Ability, Self, Writers)
"I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print."
- John Mortimer
(Related: Fear, Censorship, Laws, Magic, Writers)
"The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt."
- John Mortimer
(Related: Life, Writer)
"At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good."
- Walter Mosley
(Related: Time, Now, World, Writer, Writers)
"On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place."
- Paul Muldoon
(Related: Fact, Influence, Ireland, Writers)
"A writer can write in an attic, or on top of a bus. Or with a sharp stick in some wet cement. To act, an actor has to have words. A stage. a camera turning."
- Paul Muni
(Related: Act, Actor, Words, Writer)
"I didn't want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it."
- Haruki Murakami
(Related: Ability, Countries, Now, Respect, Want, Writer)
"When Ted Williams was here, inducted into the Hall of Fame 37 years ago, he said he must have earned it, because he didn't win it because of his friendship with the writers. I guess in that way, I'm proud to be in this company that way."
- Eddie Murray
(Related: Friendship, Company, Fame, Writers, Years)
"It's a bit of a crapshoot out there with young writers right now anyway."
- George Murray
(Related: Now, Right, Writers)
"And thus it was that I started to wonder why Robert Burns is so important to us. We have other poets, and other writers, and other heroes, yet we do not afford them the veneration that we afford to Robert Burns."
- Len G. Murray
(Related: Heroes, Poets, Wonder, Writers)
"A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist."
- Vladimir Nabokov
(Related: Imagination, Writer)
"We make a contract within ourselves as actors or directors or writers about how much of ourselves we let into projects. You can actually figure out before you work on something how much blood you will have to let emotionally."
- Ajay Naidu
(Related: Work, Actors, Blood, Projects, Will, Writers)
"The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness."
- V. S. Naipaul
(Related: Autobiography, Will, Writer)
"I am the kind of writer that people think other people are reading."
- V. S. Naipaul
(Related: People, Reading, Writer)
"I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading."
- V. S. Naipaul
(Related: People, Reading, Writer)
"We only had enough money really to cut 10 things and be in there for a month because it's expensive, you know. And, singer/songwriters, today are lucky if they can get a deal, you know. So, we actually worked so fast that we really cut 20 things."
- Graham Nash
(Related: Money, Today)
"Stargate by far is the top of the pile when it comes to Sci-Fi. The quality is great. They have really good writers, production design, lighting, wardrobe."
- Corin Nemec
(Related: Design, Quality, Production, Writers)
"When modern writers gave up telling stories, they gave up the greatest thing we had."
- Howard Nemerov
(Related: Writers)
"Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful."
- Howard Nemerov
(Related: Accident, First, Writer, Years)
"I made a conscious decision that I was not going to have children. I didn't want others raising them, and looking after them myself would get in the way of being a musician and writer."
- Stevie Nicks
(Related: Decision, Being, Children, Want, Writer)
"Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don't want to go to PTA meetings."
- Stevie Nicks
(Related: Wife, Artist, Focus, Kids, Meetings, Want, Writer)
"The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Related: Will, Writer)
"A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
(Related: Friends, Spirit, Writer)
"The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say."
- Anais Nin
(Related: Writer)
"It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it."
- Anais Nin
(Related: Art, Perception, Magic, Meaning, Writer)
"My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names."
- Larry Niven
(Related: Names, Right, Writers, Years)
"Bruce Sterling is one terrific writer and he's relatively new, but I don't know how long he's been doing it; he probably doesn't need the publicity anymore!"
- Larry Niven
(Related: Publicity, Writer)
"The comedians all finished their acts with a song. They would get a certain amount of money from the song publishers and would use that money to pay the writers. None of them paid very much for their comedy material, but it all added up."
- Denis Norden
(Related: Money, Comedians, Comedy, Song, Writers)
"I never thought I'd be a writer. I never thought I'd be able to read a book, let alone write one. So if books like this inspire kids to write, or even read a whole book, I think it's good."
- Don Novello
(Related: Thought, Books, Kids, Writer)
"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."
- Alden Nowlan
(Related: American, Poverty, Writers)
"So, through all that early professional career I would occasionally do a musical, a pantomime or a play with songs. The next stop would be a Shakespeare, or an Ibsen, or a play by a brand new writer who had never done anything in the theater before."
- Trevor Nunn
(Related: Career, Play, Shakespeare, Songs, Theater, Writer)
"If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space."
- Joyce Carol Oates
(Related: Car, Driving, Housework, Silence, Space, Walking, Writer, Writing)
"Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply."
- Joyce Carol Oates
(Related: Life, People, Artist, Personality, World, Writer)
"Writers really live in the mind and in hotels of the soul."
- Edna O'Brien
(Related: Soul, Mind, Writers)
"Everywhere I go I'm asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them."
- Kate O'Brien
(Related: Opinion, University, Writers)
"Writers never get a very good deal in Hollywood."
- Richard O'Brien
(Related: Hollywood, Writers)
"The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention."
- Flannery O'Connor
(Related: Attention, Nothing, Writer)
"When a book leaves your hands, it belongs to God. He may use it to save a few souls or to try a few others, but I think that for the writer to worry is to take over God's business."
- Flannery O'Connor
(Related: Business, God, May, Worry, Writer)
"The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location."
- Flannery O'Connor
(Related: Time, Eternity, Writer)
"The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live."
- Flannery O'Connor
(Related: Writer)
"Everywhere I go, I'm asked if I think the universities stifle writers. My opinion is that they don't stifle enough of them. There's many a best seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher."
- Flannery O'Connor
(Related: Opinion, Writers)
"I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best."
- Flannery O'Connor
(Related: Writer, Writing)
"It seems that the fiction writer has a revolting attachment to the poor, for even when he writes about the rich, he is more concerned with what they lack than with what they have."
- Flannery O'Connor
(Related: Fiction, Poor, Writer)
"Manners are of such great consequence to the novelist that any kind will do. Bad manners are better than no manners at all, and because we are losing our customary manners, we are probably overly conscious of them; this seems to be a condition that produces writers."
- Flannery O'Connor
(Related: Losing, Manners, Will, Writers)
"I am one of the writers who wish to create serious works of literature which dissociate themselves from those novels which are mere reflections of the vast consumer cultures of Tokyo and the subcultures of the world at large."
- Kenzaburo Oe
(Related: Literature, World, Writers)
"Much as I like owning a Rolls-Royce, I could do without it. What I could not do without is a typewriter, a supply of yellow second sheets and the time to put them to good use."
- John O'Hara
(Related: Time)
"They say great themes make great novels. but what these young writers don't understand is that there is no greater theme than men and women."
- John O'Hara
(Related: Men, Women, Writers)
"It's always hard when you're playing someone for a lot of people out there who are going to see the movie after reading the books. There's a communion between a reader and the writer, so people will have an idea who Sirius Black is and I might not be everyone's idea of that."
- Gary Oldman
(Related: People, Idea, Books, Reading, Will, Writer)
"There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die."
- Sharon Olds
(Related: Society, Encouraging, Books, Poets, Writers)
"I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression."
- Sharon Olds
(Related: Day, Depression, Reading, Writer)
"I think that there are fiction writers for whom that works well. I could never do it. I feel as if, by the time I see that it's a poem, it's almost written in my head somewhere."
- Sharon Olds
(Related: Time, Fiction, Writers)
"If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer."
- Mary Oliver
(Related: Work, Writer)
"Writers sometimes give up what is most strange and wonderful about their writing - soften their roughest edges - to accommodate themselves toward a group response."
- Mary Oliver
(Related: Writers, Writing)
"I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing."
- Mary Oliver
(Related: Love, Feelings, Duty, Writers)
"A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch."
- Michael Ondaatje
(Related: Pen, Writer)
"As a writer, one is busy with archaeology."
- Michael Ondaatje
(Related: Writer)
"It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow."
- Michael Ondaatje
(Related: Responsibility, Writer)
"My Panasonic typewriter can make graphs. It types in four different colors."
- Heather O'Rourke
(Related: Colors)
"For a creative writer possession of the "truth" is less important than emotional sincerity."
- George Orwell
(Related: Possession, Sincerity, Writer)
"I've hung out in the writer's room a few times, but the fact is we've got such a good writing staff, I don't want to get my peanut butter fingerprints on anything."
- Patton Oswalt
(Related: Fact, Want, Writer, Writing)
"I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer."
- Cynthia Ozick
(Related: Obvious, Writer)
"I remember Tim telling me that he had an idea for a musical and he said to me that he was hoping that ABBA would be writing the music, which I thought was a pretty wild idea because they were obviously known very much as pop writers."
- Elaine Paige
(Related: Music, Thought, Idea, Pretty, Writers, Writing)
"You become a writer because you need to become a writer - nothing else."
- Grace Paley
(Related: Nothing, Writer)
"In 1986 we were trying to help women get in print, stay in print, and come to the attention of booksellers and libraries. At that time, books by men mystery writers were reviewed seven times as often as books by women."
- Sara Paretsky
(Related: Men, Women, Time, Attention, Books, Help, Libraries, Mystery, Trying, Writers)
"I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being a writer without a blink."
- Robert B. Parker
(Related: Life, Being, Boys, Choice, Sons, World, Writer)
"College had little effect on me. I'd have been the same writer if I'd gone to MIT, except I'd have flunked out sooner."
- Robert B. Parker
(Related: College, Effect, Writer)
"It's this simple law, which every writer knows, of taking two opposites and putting them in a room together. I love anything with Cartman and Butters at the same time, it's great."
- Trey Parker
(Related: Love, Time, Law, Opposites, Writer)
"The main concern of the study is with the outline of a theoretical system. Its minor variations from writer to writer are not a matter of concern to this analysis."
- Talcott Parsons
(Related: Concern, Study, Writer)
"If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works."
- John Dos Passos
(Related: Contemplation, Hell, Writers)
"Many attempts have been made by writers on art and poetry to define beauty in the abstract, to express it in the most general terms, to find some universal formula for it."
- Walter Pater
(Related: Art, Beauty, Poetry, Formula, Writers)
"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."
- James Payn
(Related: People, Present, Writers)
"I allowed the scriptwriter to come to my parties for research and it's a good thing he did otherwise I don't think Personal Services would've been so good."
- Cynthia Payne
(Related: Research)
"Writers, you know, are the beggars of Western society."
- Octavio Paz
(Related: Society, Writers)
"Inside of all the makeup and the character and makeup, it's you, and I think that's what the audience is really interested in... you, how you're going to cope with the situation, the obstacles, the troubles that the writer put in front of you."
- Gregory Peck
(Related: Character, Makeup, Obstacles, Writer)
"A word is not the same with one writer as with another. One tears it from his guts. The other pulls it out of his overcoat pocket."
- Charles Peguy
(Related: Tears, Word, Writer)
"I've probably had my day in the sun. I think I've influenced a lot of comic book writers."
- Harvey Pekar
(Related: Day, Sun, Writers)
"I met Robert Crumb in 1962; he lived in Cleveland for a while. I took a look at his stuff. Crumb was doing stuff beyond what other writers and artists were doing. It was a step beyond Mad."
- Harvey Pekar
(Related: Artists, Writers)
"Think of an economy where people could be an artist or a photographer or a writer without worrying about keeping their day job in order to have health insurance."
- Nancy Pelosi
(Related: Health, People, Artist, Day, Economy, Job, Order, Writer)
"Sean's a great, great writer."
- Robin Wright Penn
(Related: Writer)
"Mystery writers' conventions are usually good, and this one has been excellent and extremely well prepared and thought out in advance. A lot of people have given their time and their skill, and a good deal of wit, and Anchorage has made us extraordinarily welcome."
- Anne Perry
(Related: Time, Thought, People, Mystery, Skill, Wit, Writers)
"It's important, I think, for a writer of fiction to maintain an awareness of the pace and shape of the book as he's writing it. That is, he should be making an object, not chattering."
- Thomas Perry
(Related: Awareness, Fiction, Writer, Writing)
"Contrary to what many writers imply about the process, nobody forces a writer to sell his work to the film industry."
- Thomas Perry
(Related: Work, Film, Writer, Writers)
"All writers are mimics, and I'm not interested in picking up somebody else's style or voice."
- Thomas Perry
(Related: Style, Voice, Writers)
"I am the worlds laziest writer."
- Oscar Peterson
(Related: Writer)
"Traditionally, songwriters can't sing. And that holds true in my case, also."
- John Phillips
"The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved."
- Marge Piercy
(Related: Work, Talent, Being, Cure, Fact, Fire, Invention, Writer)
"It was in New York, and I've always wanted to film in New York. And the writer was a teenage friend of mine. We did youth theatre together when we were 16 and always had a dream of making a film together. And ten years later, we've done it. So it's great."
- Rosamund Pike
(Related: Dream, Friend, Film, Teenage, Theatre, Writer, Years, Youth)
"As many political writers have pointed out, commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones."
- Steven Pinker
(Related: Equality, People, Commitment, Writers)
"I'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one."
- Daniel Pinkwater
(Related: Day, Occupation, Trying, Writer)
"I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays."
- Harold Pinter
(Related: Man, Writer)
"Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!"
- Luigi Pirandello
(Related: Death, Character, Luck, Man, Will, Writer)
"I did that for 40 years or more. I never had any writer's block. I got up in the morning, sat down at the typewriter - now, computer - lit up a cigarette."
- Frederik Pohl
(Related: Computer, Now, Writer, Years)
"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."
- Marcus V. Pollio
(Related: Gods, Benefits, Public, Writers)
"I don't have a normal job, so I really appreciate having friends who are writers and artists. It's fun to have a group of people you can call in the middle of the day to go for a hike."
- Natalie Portman
(Related: People, Artists, Day, Friends, Fun, Job, Writers)
"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."
- Chaim Potok
(Related: People, Creativity, Writers)
"A non-fiction writer pretty much has the shape of the figure in front of him or her and goes about refining it. A work of non-fiction is not as difficult to write as a work of fiction, but it's not as satisfying in the end."
- Chaim Potok
(Related: Work, End, Fiction, Pretty, Writer)
"God, I'm such a lazy writer - I can't even think up new names."
- Dennis Potter
(Related: God, Names, Writer)
"Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Ability, Literature, Writers)
"I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Work, Criticism, Excitement, Value, Writer, Writing)
"Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear."
- Ezra Pound
(Related: Language, Writers)
"The hard part of writing at all is sitting your ass down in a chair and writing it. There's always something better to do, like I've got an interview, sharpening the pencils, trimming the roses. There's always something better to do. Going to a writer's club?"
- Jerry Pournelle
(Related: Roses, Writer, Writing)
"And that's another piece of advice I'll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go."
- Jerry Pournelle
(Related: Advice, Writers)
"Write a lot. And finish what you write. Don't join writer's clubs and go sit around having coffee reading pieces of your manuscript to people. Write it. Finish it. I set those rules up years ago, and nothing's changed."
- Jerry Pournelle
(Related: People, Coffee, Nothing, Reading, Rules, Writer, Years)
"I started in this racket in the early '70s, and when I was president of the Science Fiction Writers of America, of which I was like the sixth president, I was the first one nobody ever heard of."
- Jerry Pournelle
(Related: Science, America, Fiction, First, President, Writers)
"I think it takes about a million words to make a writer. I mean that you're going to throw away."
- Jerry Pournelle
(Related: Words, Writer)
"To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength."
- Lawrence Clark Powell
(Related: Strength, Vision, Literature, Needs, Writer)
"I write because I write - as anyone in the arts does. You're a painter because you feel you have no choice but to paint. You're a writer because this is what you do."
- Richard Price
(Related: Choice, Writer)
"Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day."
- Richard Price
(Related: Day, Letters, Mind, Writers, Years)
"The greatest writers of this age... are aware of the mystery of our existence."
- J. B. Priestley
(Related: Age, Existence, Mystery, Writers)
"Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write."
- J. B. Priestley
(Related: Writer)
"There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent."
- J. B. Priestley
(Related: Talent, Genius, Writers)
"Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself."
- Marcel Proust
(Related: Work, Writer)
"The writer needs to react to his or her own internal universe, to his or her own point of view. If he or she doesn't have a personal point of view, it's impossible to be a creator."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Needs, Universe, Writer)
"Writers are not meant for action."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Action, Writers)
"I've never seen a worse situation than that of young writers in the United States. The publishing business in North America is so commercialized."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Business, America, Publishing, states, United, Writers)
"I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Writer)
"Ironically, Latin American countries, in their instability, give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Hope, American, Countries, Intellectuals, Writers)
"It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied."
- Manuel Puig
(Related: Ideology, Party, Writer)
"The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters."
- Salvatore Quasimodo
(Related: Men, Possibilities, Writer)
"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."
- Charlotte Rae
(Related: Actors, Public, Writers)
"Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible."
- Craig Raine
(Related: Writers)
"I always claim that the writer has done 90 percent of the director's work."
- Harold Ramis
(Related: Work, Writer)
"What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window."
- Burton Rascoe
(Related: Wife, Writer)
"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."
- John Ratzenberger
(Related: People, Projects, Reason, Swearing, Words, Writers)
"You must make the product interesting, not just make the ad different. And that's what too many of the copywriters in the U.S. today don't yet understand."
- Rosser Reeves
(Related: Today)
"Comedians are really writers who don't have pens and pencils about them, but they riff."
- Carl Reiner
(Related: Comedians, Writers)
"Nothing would make me happier if Peter Falk would finally win his Oscar for this. Not just as the writer but as a fan and a friend. It would be so great."
- Paul Reiser
(Related: Friend, Nothing, Writer)
"Dickens is a very underrated writer at the moment. Everyone in his time admired him but I think right now he's not spoken of enough."
- Anne Rice
(Related: Time, Now, Right, Writer)
"I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that."
- Anne Rice
(Related: American, Doubt, Writers)
"You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well."
- Anne Rice
(Related: Pretty, Writers)
"Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups."
- Anne Rice
(Related: Success, Gain, Writers)
"There may be writing groups where people meet but it's occasional. You really do it all at your own computer or your own typewriter by yourself."
- Anne Rice
(Related: People, Computer, May, Writing)
"Obviously, a writer can't know everything about what she writes. It's impossible."
- Anne Rice
(Related: Writer)
"Stephen King in many respects is a wonderful writer. He has made a contribution. People in the future will be able to pick up Stephen King's books and learn a lot about who we were by reading those books."
- Anne Rice
(Related: People, Books, Future, Reading, Will, Writer)
"That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra."
- Anne Rice
(Related: Lonely, Pretty, Training, Writer)
"Between us and the writers, it was comedy hour the whole time. We could hardly get through it."
- Buddy Rice
(Related: Time, Comedy, Writers)
"Coming from Canada, being a writer and Jewish as well, I have impeccable paranoia credentials."
- Mordecai Richler
(Related: Being, Canada, Paranoia, Writer)
"The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work."
- Mordecai Richler
(Related: Work, Writer)
"The writing career is not a romantic one. The writer's life may be colorful, but his work itself is rather drab."
- Mary Roberts Rinehart
(Related: Life, Work, Career, May, Romantic, Writer, Writing)
"As a guest who doesn't eat, drink or smoke, you leave much to be desired, but as a writer, you're my girl."
- Thelma Ritter
(Related: Guest, Writer)
"Alan's publishing company was in the Brill Building, and of course, the Brill Building was where all the songwriters hung out because that's where all the publishers were."
- Johnny Rivers
(Related: Building, Company, Publishing)
"I'm fairly competant as a director and actor, but I am Mr. Neurotic as a writer. I just don't have enough confidence in my abilities to take criticism well. I take it personally. Start with 'It's a masterpiece,' and then tell me what you think could be changed."
- Tim Robbins
(Related: Actor, Confidence, Criticism, Writer)
"Every writer has to figure out what works best - and often has to select and discard different tools before they find the one that fits."
- Nora Roberts
(Related: Tools, Writer)
"I believe strongly in writing groups such as Romance Writers Of America that offer support, information and networking."
- Nora Roberts
(Related: Romance, America, Information, Support, Writers, Writing)
"Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other."
- Nora Roberts
(Related: Love, Motivation, Action, Emotion, Writer, Writing)
"They should have a rule: in order to be a sportswriter, you have to have played that sport, at some level; high school, college, junior college, somewhere. Or, you should have had to have been around the game for a long time."
- Oscar Robertson
(Related: Time, College, Order, School)
"And I can say this, most of the people who have recorded my songs are songwriters themselves."
- Smokey Robinson
(Related: People, Songs)
"I've always seen it as the role of an artist to drag his inside out, give the audience all you've got. Writers, actors, singers, all good artists do the same. It isn't supposed to be easy."
- Henry Rollins
(Related: Actors, Artist, Artists, Writers)
"I was never really a writer, I was always more of a performer."
- Mick Ronson
(Related: Writer)
"Sportswriters. They were all my friends. They were racetrack guys and so was I."
- Art Rooney
(Related: Friends)
"I'm not really a songwriter - I'm an interpreter. So in a sense I am an actress first and foremost. I act out the songs, and I lead with my heart."
- Diana Ross
(Related: Heart, Act, First, Sense, Songs)
"Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers - same thing exactly."
- Harold Ross
(Related: Writers)
"Writers are the lunatic fringe of publishing."
- Judith Rossner
(Related: Publishing, Writers)
"The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it."
- Leo Rosten
(Related: Being, Help, Reason, Writer)
"The writer wants to be understood much more than he wants to be respected or praised or even loved. And that perhaps, is what makes him different from others."
- Leo Rosten
(Related: Writer)
"A writer writes not because he is educated but because he is driven by the need to communicate. Behind the need to communicate is the need to share. Behind the need to share is the need to be understood."
- Leo Rosten
(Related: Writer)
"Ilike ideas writers have that I might not have written. Writers are there for a reason... to write for me."
- Tim Roth
(Related: Ideas, Reason, Writers)
"The main engagement of the writer is towards truthfulness; therefore he must keep his mind and his judgement free."
- Gabrielle Roy
(Related: Mind, Writer)
"Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail."
- Rudy Rucker
(Related: Science, Being, Fiction, Now, Wonder, Writer)