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.
I was not a successful TV comedy writer.
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.
To be an Indian writer is to write, necessarily and inevitably, about politics, so it was a given that the story of the Ghoshes, the family at the centre of 'The Lives of Others,' should have a political soul.
I always felt that I was a writer, that was what I had to do.
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.
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.
My biggest excuse to others and myself was that I had writer's block, as if it was some kind of illness.
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.
I don't have many hours in a day, as I'm essentially a single parent. But fortunately, I'm a really fast writer. My goal is usually 10 pages a day. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but by the end of the week, I aim for at least 10,000 words.
I don't think it's possible to separate out the strands of a writer's history, circumstances, life events, and that writer's themes.
I never set out to be a published 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.
I'm looking forward to coming to SleuthFest I've heard so many good things about it from my writer friends. I'm looking forward to seeing my buddies and talking to readers who want to know about the way I work.
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.
As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.
Big Stephen King fan. I think he's dismissed often as a hack probably because of his prolific body of work, but he's anything but. I think he's a terrific writer. And not just a genre writer; he really approaches a number of complexities in everything he writes. So I'm a huge fan.
A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.
The relationship between reader and characters is very difficult. It is even more peculiar than the relationship between the writer and his characters.
In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.
I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.
My favorite thing is being able to follow my inspiration, and the freedom of being a writer is hard to beat.
I always wanted to be a writer.
A writer's work is to witness things.
How do I tell people who I am? Not being a writer, the only way is to sing songs that reflect my opinions.
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.
A novelist, poet and playwright who writes equally well in Shona and English, Charles Mungoshi is Zimbabwe's finest and most versatile writer. His life project has been to interrogate the notion of family.
There's no point for me in being a writer and having all these blocked places where I feel I can't think freely and imagine freely. There just really is no point.
I'm only an actor. I'm not a writer. I'm not going to leave any legacy. All I've ever done is learn the lines and say them.
I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.
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.
My mom worked as a pharmacist, but she is one of the best storytellers I know. My sister is a gospel and opera singer and my brother, who passed away, was a writer.
I was desperately shy when I was wee. Totally lacked confidence socially. When I look back at school photographs, I'm always the one shrinking in the back. What I really wanted to do was become a writer, and I don't think the residue of that has ever gone away. I still feel the ultimate achievement would be to write a novel.
I had no idea that 'Less Than Zero' was going to be read by anyone outside of Los Angeles, and it's - believe me, as the writer of the book I'm somewhat amused and intrigued by the idea that 25 years later it's still out and people are still reading it.
The writer creates the role on the page and then the actor takes it and makes it their own.
It's not easy making a living as a writer, and for many years I worked at a Waterstones in Dublin. It was a good environment for an aspiring writer, with lots of events and authors appearing.
