Certainly, I know what it's like to be obsessed. I haven't always been there for my children. They could reach me, but I wasn't always there. But, you know, that's not necessarily anything to do with being a writer. I mean, a taxi driver could have the same problem... Maybe.
I can't tell you any more than any other writer can tell you why they write, and I don't know what my influences are.
I learned so much by being an actor, and part of my sort-of development as a writer is big thanks to the scripts I read in my acting life.
I thought I'd definitely be a writer, whatever I did.
I think of myself as a writer with a sense of humour rather than a comedy writer. Happy to tell a story with lots of jokes in it - I wouldn't know how to do jokes without the story.
A writer should have this little voice inside of you saying, Tell the truth. Reveal a few secrets here.
Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it. Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer.
At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
The whole mythological side of 'Twin Peaks' was really down to me, and I've always known about the Theosophical writers and that whole group around the Order of the Golden Dawn in the late nineteenth, early twentieth century - W. B. Yeats, Madame Blavatsky, and a woman called Alice Bailey, a very interesting writer.
As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of.
I had never thought of myself as a director and found out that I was not. I am a writer who was able to direct the films that I write.
There was a writer in the '20s called Christopher Morley, who I remember a little bit of, who had some influence on me, but I couldn't tell you what it was.
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
I always felt that it was easier to take a funny person and teach them to write television than to take somebody who was a television writer and make them funny. And I discovered a lot of great writers that went on to do a lot of great shows like 'Seinfeld,' 'Friends,' you know, 'Three and a Half Men.'
Many writers secretly long to be performers. You always get the 'if you weren't a writer' question. I would be a back-up singer, to stand in the back and go like 'do, do, do.'
The education that prepared me was my general education classes, which I tried to avoid when I was a stupid undergraduate, but which gave me the foundation of general knowledge that makes a career as a writer possible.
That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.
I suspect that writer's block afflicts mainly people who have some stable and ample source of income outside of writing. So far it hasn't been a problem.
Every human being has hundreds of separate people living under his skin. The talent of a writer is his ability to give them their separate names, identities, personalities and have them relate to other characters living with him.
I've been an inveterate reader of literary magazines since I was a teenager. There are always discoveries. You're sitting in your easy chair, reading; you realize you've read a story or a group of poems four times, and you know, Yes, I want to go farther with this writer.
I am an artist and have no right buggering about with verbs and split infinitives, which is what being a writer says to me.
I was very pleased, obviously, to have outsold great writers. But I'm not insane - I do realise that I am a popular writer who people buy to take on vacation.
I live on the margin of just about everything. I'm a marginal person, and I think that is where I've become comfortable. I'm marginally there in my native life. I can do as much as I can, but I'm always German, too, you know, and I'm always a mother. That's my first identity, but I'm always a writer, too.
Henry Miller is a famous writer whose work has fallen out of fashion, but I strongly recommend that readers who don't know his work pick up a book and experience this writer's zealous, crazy, inventive, funny, sexy, often delirious prose.
I'm a fast writer.
During the writer's strike I was walking a line and ran into Jack Black and he said, 'We're doing Airborne 2!', and I asked, 'Are you kidding?', and he said, 'Yeah.' I like 'Airborne,' its very pure.
Since I can barely write two books a year the best solution seems to be co-author projects. My goal isn't to get another writer to clone me... it's more to produce a book that shares my vision of positive, fun entertainment.
When I give myself over to a good novel, I surrender to the truths fashioned from one writer's heart, mind and soul. I do not waste a nanosecond wondering whether what I'm reading 'really happened.'
To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.
I believe that a writer learns from every story he writes, and when you try different things, you learn different lessons. Working with other writers, as in Hollywood or in a shared world series, will also strengthen your skills, by exposing you to new ways of seeing the work, and different approaches to certain creative challenges.
I feel when a writer treats a character as 'precious,' the writer runs the risk of turning them into a comic book character. There's nothing wrong with comic book characters in comic books, but I don't write comic books.
I always wrote. 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.
My main ambition as a teenager was to somehow resurrect the dark-minded writer Franz Kafka and become his girlfriend.
I'm a competent novelist. I'm getting better. But I'm a really good short story writer.
As a very experienced writer once told me, 'It's in the rewrites'.
If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That's enough.
