If you think about becoming a writer, that's just really one of the big dreams I had. It's really important to have those dreams and pursue your passions.
Stand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting. But you can go from acting to being a TV personality to being a radio personality to being a writer to being a producer, to just being a visionary, to voiceover work.
It's aggravating to me when you meet people that are just... you know, there's a difference between wanting to be an actor or a writer or something creative, and just wanting to be seen.
I love the village in my computer. There's little validation in the day-to-day life of a writer; sometimes we ache for a connection.
My chief identity, to my mind, was not 'writer' but 'college dropout.'
Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.
I didn't really sign up to be a celebrity, I only signed up to be a writer.
Putting out compilation records, buying the right to music is incredibly complicated. You have to find the writer of the song and the publisher of the song - not the singer - and make two separate deals.
Sometimes a writer just needs a hook.
My guitarist husband, Mike, and writer me are the old-fashioned kind of bohemians. Not 'fro-haired hipsters gyrating in iPod ads, but the sort who, starting January 1 of every year, literally don't know where their next dime is coming from.
I've found that in fiction - and this is just the kind of writer I am - I can't really work from an outline. I have a vague idea of the characters at the beginning of the book, and then I have a vague idea of whatever the end of the book will be, but I can't approach creative nonfiction like that.
I think I'm a writer, and it's my job. People in other professions are expected to do their jobs all the time. Why shouldn't I?
Now, being a science fiction writer, when I see a natural principle, I wonder if it could fail.
I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.
A great writer requires a great biography, and a great biography must tell the truth.
No honest writer today can possibly avoid being influenced by Freud through his pioneering work into the Unconscious and by the influence of those discoveries on the scientific, philosophic, and artistic work of his contemporaries: but not, by any means, necessarily through Freud's own writing.
The painter, sculptor, writer, and musician are protected by law. So are inventors. But the chef has absolutely no redress for plagiarism on his work; on the contrary, the more the latter is liked and appreciated, the more will people clamour for his recipes.
When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.
A dream of mine is to become an executive producer and writer. I would love if that ended up happening to me in the future.
As a writer, I was shaped by a desire to write for black people. That things were not being represented. That was my motivating force. That it has become what it has become is shocking to me. I just wanted to be able to take care of my kids.
As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.
When people used to call me a political writer, it was kind of confusing because I was always much more interested in the social end of things which hinges on the political, but it isn't really part of it.
That's the holy grail as a TV writer, to work on a story that you care about and to put it out there and for it to find the audience and connect with fans and connect with critics.
Two wrongs may not make a right, but a thousand wrongs make a writer.
Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive for the writer.
I struggle as a writer, and I'm convinced that if I was at school now, I'd be termed as having ADS. Two minutes and I'm drifting.
To be misunderstood can be the writer's punishment for having disturbed the reader's peace. The greater the disturbance, the greater the possibility of misunderstanding.
I'm not really a plot writer - I'm more interested in the characters and sort of small events that propel the story forward.
Medicine was certainly intended to be a career. I wanted to become a psychiatrist, an adolescent ambition which, of course, is fulfilled by many psychiatrists. The doctor/psychiatrist figures in my writing are alter egos of a kind, what I would have been had I not become a writer - a personal fantasy that I've fed into my fiction.
If a writer is good at what he does, it's not easy to do a good job every day... To invent something new is almost an impossible task.
Certainly it is valuable to a trained writer to crash in an aircraft which burns. He learns several important things very quickly. Whether they will be of use to him is conditioned by survival. Survival, with honor, that outmoded and all-important word, is as difficult as ever and as all-important to a writer.
My brother is a comic-book writer, and I was always in love with comics.
It's insane that people have these Internet identities. It has very little to do with who we really are. As a writer, who I'm friends with, how I spend my time, what I look like, what I wear, what I eat, what kind of music I like - it's totally not important to the work.
I had a blog where I tried to be transparent while giving away nothing. I tweeted and Facebooked badly. As a writer, your 'voice' is your calling card, yet my voice was becoming indistinguishable from billions of other voices.
I wrote my first novel and my second novel in Chicago. It was the place where I became a writer. It's my favorite city.
I'm a writer who just happens to draw.
