Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that's a disappointment.
My essential identity is that of a writer.
Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
Of course it's why you want to become a writer - because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you also have the obligation to do it.
Smart authors, faced with storms, chose to create umbrellas. That's why a diverse group of authors banded together to create The Fiction Writer's Co-op, which will work to find innovative ways to promote each other's work and cheer each other on in a very competitive field.
As a writer, I think the greatest danger would be self-censorship.
At the age of eight I became, in my own eyes at least, a writer.
If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.
The shelf life of the modern hardback writer is somewhere between the milk and the yogurt.
My greatest regret as a writer is that I've never been able to include as many jokes as I'd like.
You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing.
There was no audience for my books. The Indians didn't regard me as an Indian and North Americans couldn't conceive of me of a North American writer, not being white and brought up on wheat germ. My fiction got lost.
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.
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.
I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn't something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.
When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.
A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.
I wrote my book 'The Amorous Busboy Of Decatur Avenue' completely like a writer does, writing it down, re-writing everything. But in my stand-up, I improvise initially, never questioning it too closely.
My publisher, who was so good as a taster and editor, when she became a writer, lo and behold, it was all this feminine tosh.
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
I've experienced writer's block, but never for more than a few days.
I wasn't always a writer. When I went to college and majored in fine arts, I was a painter. Then I was a stay-at-home mom.
It is scary to write - period - for me, but once you get past the idea that it's scary to write, I still can only be who I am. As a writer, my job, to me, is to expose myself - to really sort of dig in and find out who I am and then put it on the page.
I was a little press writer when the National Endowment for the Arts came to my rescue and gave me an award. I couldn't buy a light bulb. Almost more than the money, the awards are important because they show that someone believes in you.
Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people that I've met, my family, or myself. Being a writer, you can draw only from what you know. I am lucky to have really rich and interesting people in my family for, you know, interesting family nights and great characters.
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.
I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'
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.
Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.
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.
Being lonely is not a bad thing for a writer.
A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.
The reason that I'm a writer today is because of Shakespeare and falling in love with Shakespeare when I was 8. That was through the movies, actually - through Olivier's 'Hamlet.' That was the first thing that got me to fall in love with Shakespeare and movies and everything in one big preadolescent rush.
I'm an actor and a writer, that's how I think of myself. Sometimes my time is divided equally, sometimes less equally, but that's what I do.
The hardest thing in the world for a writer is to amass a readership. So many good books come out, and so many good books disappear.
