I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.
I suppose my Iranian identity is one of the driving forces for being a writer: I want to set the record straight about who I really am.
I'm a writer. The more I act, the more resistance I have to it. If you accept work in a movie, you accept to be entrapped for a certain part of time, but you know you're getting out. I'm also earning enough to keep my horses, buying some time to write.
I think as an artist or a writer it's OK to want to control your own work.
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.
I do not consider myself a Hispanic writer.
My first break was becoming a staff writer on the rebooted '90210.' And then I got stuck writing in the teen genre for a while.
I think there's a lot of interesting stuff on TV. I feel much more optimistic about TV than I do about movies. There will always be good movies but I think, for the most part, it's always going to be a huge fight to get those movies made. TV is the best place to be as a writer, I think.
Sometimes, what's not said is just as important to the writing as what is said. As a writer, we have our voices heard. I think that, at oftentimes, the ability to allow the dialogue to recede properly into the world of the film is also a really valid sort of way to be a writer, I think.
I didn't raise Todd to be a writer, but he happened to be one anyway.
I was a writer. I just wasn't a very good one. I was lucky enough to have a playwriting teacher who told me that I'd be a better actor than I would a playwright.
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.
When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.
There is no greater compliment for a writer than to have pleased a troubled child.
The writer of stories or of novels settles on men and imitates them; he exhausts the possibilities of his characters.
What I described in 'Another Life' - about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened - is a frequent experience in a younger writer.
The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.
Should you create a protagonist based directly on yourself? The problem with this - and it is a very large problem - is that almost no one can view himself objectively on the page. As the writer, you're too close to your own complicated makeup.
I actually started trying to be a professional writer with novels, and I wrote two that exist and are around... kind of. But they never really went anyplace in particular. I still like them both. What it showed me was that you can spend years on a novel, and then it could just be, like, OK, you spent that time and that's that.
The gift of a writer as good as Dickens is not to explain everything; that way, the reader has, in terms of their imagination, somewhere to go.
The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.
In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.
For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.
When I make my own videos, I am the writer, the editor, the lighting person, everything - that's why my videos are blurry.
I'm not sure if I always wanted to be a writer, but I was always writing.
I hear that 5 o'clock whistle in my mind like Fred Flintstone and I have to stop. I'm also not much of a morning writer. I have a sweet spot from about 11am to 4pm. But I really work during that time.
Music is where I have the most creative freedom, but I love producing. To me, that's kind of where all the action is. You get a chance to have your hands in every aspect of a film. From picking a director, sometimes picking a writer, to the actors, the wardrobe, set design, editing, music, and marketing.
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.
You're a reader as well as a writer, so write what you'd want to read.
I don't want to be remembered as a writer. I would rather be remembered as a storyteller.
Both of my parents were journalists, and my rebellion, such as it was, was to become a fiction writer.
The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.
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.
Don't copy another writer's style, because that is not authentic, and that's how it will sound. You develop your style over your whole life and through countless influences. Don't impose something artificial.
Growing up a lonely only child prepared me for the years of solitude spent as a writer; years spent in the company of people who don't exist, imaginary people you have conversations with. It's a paid form of madness, this writing stuff.
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.
