I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.
The quality of what is said inevitably influences the way in which it is said, however inexperienced the writer.
Every time I enter a country and have to write down my occupation at customs, I'm like, 'I don't know... Author? Host? Writer? Stand-up?' I usually write 'author' - that's the safest bet.
The writer of prose can only step aside when the poet passes.
I'm really clear about what my life mission is now. There's no more depression or lethargy, and I feel like I've returned to the athlete I once was. I'm integrating all the parts of me - jock, musician, writer, poet, philosopher - and becoming stronger as a result.
As far as I'm concerned, the entire reason for becoming a writer is not having to get up in the morning.
I always squirm when I read what's called 'creative nonfiction,' and the writer is lobbing gobs of emotion and language at the world, hoping some of it will stick.
Books are something social - a writer speaking to a reader - so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
A writer is, after all, only half his book. The other half is the reader and from the reader the writer learns.
My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences; just the same, you need to understand that many of the writers we have now couldn't load a revolver.
I didn't want to be a writer. First I wanted to act, and then I wanted to be a painter like my big sister.
I certainly derived my skills as a prose writer from my scrutiny of poetry and of the individual word. But schools don't do things like that anymore - tracking words down to their roots.
Of course it is very limiting to be labeled a lesbian or queer writer. We live in a homophobic culture, and even people who aren't hateful per se assume they won't get anything from a queer book.
When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.
I think I told my parents I wanted to be a writer, just so they'd kind of think I had some direction in life. It made it easier to pick out classes at college, like, 'Oh, this is writing classes, that's what I'm doing.'
A writer uses a pen instead of a scalpel or blow torch.
Between the two dream coasts, we're just called flyover country... If you aren't known as an amorphous Eastern Seaboard writer, you're dismissed as a regional author.
Writing requires the concentration of the writer, demands that nothing else be done except that.
As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.
The thing about being a mystery writer, what marks a mystery writer out from a chick lit author or historical fiction writer, is that you always find a mystery in every situation.
People are always saying that I must have been the class clown, with all these voices. No, I was way too shy to be the class clown; I was a class clown's writer.
For what I wrote that started this whole controversy, I deserved to be criticized, and I felt bad about writing it. I felt bad mainly as a writer and a thinker.
My passion is becoming involved in good work, whether that means as an actor or writer or director or producer or all - that is not as important to me.
We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.
I never intended to be a professional writer; as the story developed, the one thing I had in my hopes was that this would be something tangible to separate me from the nameless, numbered masses.
I suffer depression only in the sense that I am a writer. We don't have proper jobs to go to. We are on our own all day. Show me a writer who doesn't get depressed: who has a completely stable mood. They'd be a garage mechanic or something.
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
I really believe that a writer is someone who has trained their mind to misbehave.
There's an inherent idea that if a Black executive producer and a Black director are going to do a movie based on a Black writer's book that everybody is going to be Black.
As a writer, I don't have a sense of my own position. I try to disappear and not to think of myself at all when I'm working.
Whether you do stand-up comedy or write a story, you have a duty to deliver. As a comedian, you walk out on stage, and you have a minute to hook them, or they'll start booing. As a writer, it's very similar. A reader doesn't have time to say, 'I'll give him 50 pages, as it's not very good yet, but I hope it'll get better.'
If I have any advantage, maybe, as a writer, it is that I don't think I'm very interesting. I mean, beginning a novel with the last sentence is a pretty plodding way to spend your life.
I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme.
I never wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a book illustrator. I used to hurry home from school and draw.
Vita Sackville-West is one of my favorite female icons. She was a writer and a prolific gardener, but she also had a relationship with Virginia Woolf, and she was married to Sir Harold Nicolson. She was a woman who lived outside of norms.
