I'm not an autobiographical writer, but I am a writer who deals with human emotion on all levels.
I am a writer of the textbooks of scientology.
Being a writer - even a best-selling one - is usually not anywhere near as public as being a movie star, at least not when I'm out in 'real life' like this. Not that I don't use what fame I have, every chance I get, to help sell more books.
Definitely I grew up listening to Joni Mitchell, and I think she is a wonderful writer, so she is probably part of me.
As a writer, it is my job to tell a story. I don't want to get involved in social commentary; I just want to show issues from a different point of view. I want to show issues from a perspective that may not be highlighted.
Everyone else thinks I'm a nonfiction writer. I think it's because my nonfiction is easier to find. But I write both in equal measure. I love writing fiction because I can totally lose myself, and I get to make up the rules of the world that I'm writing.
A writer's main tool is his memory - his own memory, the collective memory of his people. And the strongest memory is the one that is created by a wound to the heart.
I love books where you feel you're having a romance with the writer.
Sometimes you make a connection with a writer or a piece of material, and there's not much to ask.
I have a certain sensibility that I bring to my writing that comes from knowing two things: what I as a reader like to read, and what as a writer I am capable of. I know my own limits. I know there are things I cannot do.
My dad is a successful television producer, director and writer, and my mom's a director and writer. Even when I was young, I wanted to be an actress.
When you're learning, especially to write, unless you're some incredibly gifted writer, a young Malcom Gladwell, say, you need to be imitating people. You need to be imitating how they make their work, how they structure it, how they design the pieces. It gives you chops; it gives you moves.
I believe in the verb, not the noun - I am not a writer, but someone compelled to write.
I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.
Created by writer Beau Willimon, who's worked on several political campaigns, 'House of Cards' cannily exploits the current widespread cynicism for our politics, catering to a public scorn that's warranted and also glib in the sort of cheap pox-on-both-houses way that means not having to pay attention.
A whole bunch of agents and editors looked at my stories, and they all said, in effect, 'You're a pretty good writer and you should probably get these published; when you grow up and write a novel, get in touch.'
There are things I read doing research, and there are certain books and writers I just love to read. There are books of Brian Morten's that I love, for instance. There's a wonderful book by an Australian writer named Helen Garner called 'The Children's Bach,' and I just love the way she uses language in it.
I pretty much drink a cup of coffee, write in my journal for a while, and then sit at a computer in my office and torture the keys. My one saving grace as a writer is that, if I'm having trouble with the novel I'm writing, I write something else, a poem or a short story. I try to avoid writer's block by always writing something.
Comedy can be, especially in a writer's room, really aggressive, kind of a very male-dominated room, and it would be hard for women. It's not a nurturing place. It's not like a lot of women are going to say, I can't wait to live that lifestyle and be in a writer's room until 2 or 3 a.m.
A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.
I've been wrestling with Kafka since I was an adolescent. I think he's a great aphorist, a great letter writer, a great diarist, a great short story writer, and a great novelist - I'd put novelist last.
I do not understand how on earth you can become a writer without seeing the world.
I am neither a writer nor a theorist. For a person who creates things to utter too many words means to regulate himself - a frightening prospect.
In Iceland, book lives matter in every sense of that phrase: The shelf-life of the book, the lives in the book, the life of the writer, and the life of the reader.
I am something of a ham. Yeah, I'd always been a writer. But in high school, I acted in plays. So it wasn't as if you had to drag the words out of my vocal chords.
Unfortunately for my family, they have a writer in the family.
I kind of romanticized what it was like to be a writer and director when I was in my early twenties. Working as a production assistant knocked that right out of me.
For a writer, New York works well. Literary work is very elitist. I worked two hours a day, maximum, and the time after that was very agreeable. I walked a lot with pleasure. Those two hours augmented the day. I wrote more here than in Paris, an entire chapter of a new novel.
The part of the process that's exciting to me is feeling like I'm in a place I've never been before, in every way. Without that, I don't know if I'd be a writer.
We've all read, I'm sure, a Superman book where we didn't really feel like we knew the character. Where the writer, often with the best of intentions, has tried put a personal stamp on the character, whether it be to try and make him more current, or cool, or have a broader appeal, etc.
I think I have grown impatient with just being a writer.
Out of the thousand writers huffing and puffing through movieland, there are scarcely fifty men and women of wit and talent... Yet, in a curious way, there is not much difference between the product of a good writer and a bad one. They both have to toe the same mark.
In the best writers, the outward-reaching interest in the 'found subject' leads back at a hairpin to some uncomfortable inner recognition that the writer has journeyed very far to see; he comes home half-dead.
All I know is Andrew Davies is an amazing writer; I adore the scripts. I think that Jeremy Piven is outstanding.
I wasn't involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They asked me at one point to write a memo about what I thought of it.
I think Bellow's the greatest American writer of his century, personally. When I read him, I'm in awe.
