I always imagined a writer was someone who lived in an attic in Paris, but my mum instilled in me a belief that I could do anything - so I ended up writing my first novel while working nights as a news reporter.
The silver lining of those years when I was trying to get 'Tinkers' published but couldn't were the years when I had to decide, Why do I want to be a writer? I realized that writing is the thing itself; writing is not a means to publication, writing is not a predicate of publication, so I spent years making art for art's sake.
I could name you a dozen superheroes whose powers I'd like to have. But if I could have any power in the world, it would be the power to read or watch a creative work and absorb the technical skill of the people who made it. Because then I could have even more fun writing. That's my core identity. I'm a writer. I just love telling stories.
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?
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.
I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.
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.
You never know what to expect when you're a writer visiting a movie set.
In live-action, writing, production, and editing happen in discrete stages. In animation, they overlap - happening simultaneously. This allows a real dialogue to occur between the writer, the director, the actors, and the editor, and it makes the writing process a lot more collaborative and a lot less lonely.
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.
The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.
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.
I think what helps me when I'm working on a play, any play, is the degree to which the writer has truly visualized, and then fulfilled, the vision of the world that he or she is creating.
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.
Where writers are from is one of the world' s most boring topics. Where we're born, gender or race, wealth or poverty - those are the things we spend time talking about. Stop trying to label me. I'm a writer. Worry about whether I'm any good!
If you're mostly a writer - if your point of departure is writing something - which for a writer/director is sort of where you start, you're really influenced by the writers you love one way or another.
I'm a singer and a writer first. I started to rap by accident, being playful.
It's very easy for a writer to spend much too much time in her head.
I think I am a writer, but professionally I feel drawn to and suited for directing.
I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.
It's the same old story. Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller - writer, musician, filmmaker.
I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.
The American writer has his hands full, trying to understand and then describe and then make credible much of American reality.
Twitter is the most amazing medium for a comedy writer. I can't get in every idea I want on the show no matter how hard I try to bully the other writers, so it's a way of me getting out other comic ideas and immediately getting feedback.
I'm a singer, a writer and an actress - when I find something that I feel good enough about doing.
Shirley Jackson enjoyed notoriety and commercial success within her lifetime, and yet it still hardly seems like enough for a writer so singular. When I meet readers and other writers of my generation, I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name.
A writer should write with his eyes and a painter paint with his ears.
Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.
A writer is a palmist, reading the lines of the planet.
I worked as a writer, lead designer, and creative director in the game industry.
I had this website that, at one point, I listed myself as 'actor, writer, comedian, and fart enthusiast' just because I thought that would be a really clear joke.
Some critics will write 'Maya Angelou is a natural writer' - which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.
A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.
When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.
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.
I think of myself as a problem-solver. I want to go in and help the director and the writer to get the best they can out of the text they're working with.
