And so, when I was a young writer I always worked hard on imagery, and I knew that the roots of imagery were the senses - and that if my readers could feel, taste and see what I was talking about, I would be able to tell them a story.
I'm not sure that the benefit - as a writer and as a citizen - that I would get from reading at least the front page of the Times every day or every other day would outweigh the depression.
The writer in movies is about as low as you can get and you really are a hired hand. You are paid a lot of money to be treated like dirt.
Where I came from, no one was a writer.
A writer wants something more than money for his work: he wants permanence.
I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans.
Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.
I felt uncomfortable calling myself a writer until I started with 'The New Yorker,' and then I was like, 'Okay, now you can call yourself that.'
And 'Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll' was a very transitional film for me in that I was one of the producers and you know, came up with the idea with the writer and the producer, as well. But, it was a very collaborative event. You know, I really love working in that way.
Nobody ever calls me a soccer-playing writer, even though I play soccer and it's part of who I am.
There's no reason you shouldn't, as a writer, not be aware of the necessity to revise yourself constantly.
Writing is work. It takes a lot of contemplation, concentration, and out-and-out sweat. People tend to romanticize it, that somehow your work appears by benefit of some mystical external force. In reality, to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. It's work, and often it's hard work.
I always wanted to write. But honestly I'm glad I didn't do it back when I was twenty-five or so, when it's now clear to me that I was a very poor writer and could've ruined my career before it even started.
We served on the editorial board of a literary monthly called Face in 1968 and 1969. He was a young writer, and I was also interested in broad cultural issues. We agreed on all major issues and became friends.
Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.
You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.
A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer; and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.
I want work that, possessing as thin a membrane as possible between life and art, foregrounds the question of how the writer solves being alive.
I bought the rights to this book, 'The Ploughmen,' by a Montana writer named Kim Zupan, and I've written the screenplay, and I really feel pretty strong about it. It's really hauntingly beautiful. It's got some suspense and great drama, but it's a real character thing.
Tobias Wolff is a hell of a writer, but you knew that already. His first memoir, 'This Boy's Life,' was a Huck Finn story set in the Eisenhower era - a story so rich and wounding that not even Hollywood could make a bad movie out of it.
My biggest bits of advice are, write as much as you can, finish what you start, get a thick skin, don't take crap from anyone, but also live your life and have fun. The stereotype of a writer holed up alone all day is really unhelpful. You can't write real people and real emotion if you don't let yourself experience them.
I've never been particularly interested in genre distinctions. They seem to me more useful to a librarian than to a writer.
I tell people all the time, as I was going through my process of being a comedian or being an actor and a writer at 'SNL,' I tell people that everything you do is all a piece of your puzzle to determine where you're going to end up at.
I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.
I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.
I quit my job, and went ashore to become a writer.
The great liberty of the fictional writer is to let the imagination out of the traces and see it gallop off over the horizon.
The writer is more concerned to know than to judge.
When writing isn't going well-then the bad thing about being a writer is that I also have the freedom and flexibility to do something badly, and no one else can fix it for me.
When a writer becomes a reader of his or her own work, a lot can go wrong. It's like do-it-yourself dentistry.
I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written 'Just Kids' had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.
There is nothing more distressing or tiresome than a writer standing in front of an audience and reading his work.
I haven't had the occasion to meet Adele. She lives in England. So when I'm flying, or when she comes over here, perhaps we'll have a chance. I think she's a very fine singer, a very strong writer and performer.
A generation before, it had been sagebrush and coyotes; a generation later, it was a burgeoning movie town. But for that brief idyllic time in 1910, Hollywood looked like the perfect place for a successful writer to settle down, build his dream house, and maybe do some gardening.
I wanted to be a writer and an artist. Learning to type as quickly as I could think was a needed skill and part of my long self-directed apprenticeship.
Something mystical happens to every writer who goes to the Masters for the first time, some sort of emotional experience that results in a search party having to be sent out to recover his typewriter from a clump of azaleas.
