A writer, by definition, is pathetic.
Volume depends precisely on the writer's having been able to sit in a room every day, year after year, alone.
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.
In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.
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.
I'm the luckiest writer on earth.
To be a Jew is an act of the strenuous mind as it stands before the fakeries and lying seductions of the world, saying no and no again as they parade by in all their allure. And to be a writer is to plunge into the parade and become one of the delirious marchers.
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.
I think plays, like books, are endemic. They grow out of the soil of the writer and the place he's writing about. I think, you just can't move them about, you know.
I grew up in Texas City, Texas. I didn't know anybody who was a director or whose parents or grandparents were directors. I met somebody from a nearby town one time whose father had been to the moon - it was far more likely to be an astronaut than it was to be a writer or a director.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better.
I've always been a writer. I hope to continue to write books until I can't anymore.
One of my biggest peeves is when the writer hasn't given you enough information to figure everything out. You should be able to go back to the beginning of 'Gone Girl,' after you've already read it and you know everything, and say, 'Check - check - yes, she gave us that information.'
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.
I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me to go into a profession that would be far more secure, so I went to medical school.
The writer is the person who stands outside society, independent of affiliation and independent of influence.
I feel like a lot of the portrayals of, in particular, younger minority ethnic characters on television, a lot of their dialogue, a lot of their characteristics, a lot of their personality in a writer's eyes, is kind of propelled through their ethnicity.
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.
The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.
When I'm not singing, I'm a lot of persons: I'm a producer. I'm a badminton player. I'm a writer. I'm a movie freak. I'm a documentary maker.
The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.
No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.
But as a writer and performer, I want to get paid for what I do.
It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.
I love John Updike immoderately. I am profoundly shocked that he has gone because he was, for me, the greatest American writer of the second half of the 20th century. He was also a gracious, charming, and witty man.
For a writer, published works are like fallen flowers, but the expected new work is like a calyx waiting to blossom.
At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.
Once I began college, I was committed to writing, which I think is different from saying I wanted to become a writer. I knew I would always write; I just wasn't always sure how I would go about doing so.
Actors are accustomed to doing exactly what the director or writer requests us to do, and rarely get involved in that part of the process.
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.
All I am is a writer and a mom.
Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.
