As a writer, it's fun to create. And once you get into a long-running show with very established characters and a very established tone and format, after a while it's a really great job, but that's what it is - a job.
As an American writer, the literary tradition that I draw on the most is the Anglo-American one, and when you are writing in this tradition, the Orientalizing Western gaze is something you have to constantly push against as well as compromise with.
It's a responsibility of the writer to get the reader out of the story somehow.
As a writer, the worst thing you can do is work in an environment of fear of rejection.
When I was in college at UCLA, I took a playwriting course. I was all set to be a writer. But I had to take this acting class as a theater arts major. I had to do this scene in a one-act comedy. I just said this line, and then... this laugh happened. I thought, 'Whoa. This is a really good feeling. What have I been missing?'
There is no mistaking the dismay on the face of a writer who has just heard that his brain child is a deformed idiot.
I would hate to be a new artist or writer in town today. But somehow the cream continues to rise. If there's one who's great, he just jumps out of the pack like you can't believe.
I would always get a lot of work as a writer, but that wasn't what I wanted to be. For me, I was only doing half of what I really wanted to do - write and direct.
I think it's so important for a woman, if she's a writer, to look as feminine as possible.
In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I, as a writer, will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe.
The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.
It's rare to work on a series without a writer. If you have a question about a line, then phone calls have to be made.
I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.
I started as a writer for magazines, and soon they asked me to illustrate my stories. I started from the bottom of the bottom. And I climbed the stairs, one by one.
The hoary joke in the literary world, based on 'Dreams From My Father,' was that if things had worked out differently for Barack Obama, he could have made it as a writer.
And I think one way or another it's evident to those who work with me that as a writer, a director, a friend, as somebody's there that's very anxious to get the movie made.
Until the 20th century it was generally assumed that a writer had said what he had to say in his works.
One tends to overlook the fact that all during the 30's and actually during the late 40's I was a highly successful writer and a great many properties accumulated during that period of time.
I'm not really worried about writer's block.
I'm not a very fancy person. I've been a writer a long time, and right now 'The Hunger Games' is getting a lot of focus. It'll pass. The focus will be on something else. It'll shift. It always does. And that seems just fine.
I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.
I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.
Occasionally, chewing over some random letter writer's dilemma, I'll find myself imagining scenarios where the problem could be sidestepped by an innocent fib or series of evasive manoeuvres. Then, I slap myself on the wrist.
The writer studies literature, not the world. He is careful of what he reads, for that is what he will write.
I used to object to being called an Indian writer, and would always say I was a writer who happened to be an Indian, and who happened to write about Indians.
I think Dan Brown is a terribly bad writer, but he has cliff-hangers after every chapter which makes you continue reading.
I'm an actor, not a writer. I'd be pretty annoyed if the writers tried to come in and hang over my shoulder telling me how to act, so I don't go in and tell them how to write.
Jokes that are gratuitously offensive are synonymous with bad writing to me. I'm offended as a writer first and as a person second.
For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time.
As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
I think of myself as a writer who photographs. Images, for me, can be considered poems, short stories or essays. And I've always thought the best place for my photographs was inside books of my own creation.
Of course I consider myself a Jewish writer - I am one! All of the protagonists in my five books have been Jewish, and I wouldn't be surprised if all my future main characters were as well.
If I get writer's block - this is going to sound funny - I take a shower. Something about the water feels like I'm cleaning my brain as well as my body.
I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing.
Cummings' career as a writer - and a painter - was as wobbly as his love life. He tried his hand at playwriting, satirical essays, and even a dance scenario for Lincoln Kirsten.
It's this simple law, which every writer knows, of taking two opposites and putting them in a room together. I love anything with Cartman and Butters at the same time, it's great.
