I like to be read. That's most of what any writer could want.
I was trained to serve the writer and director as an actor before I serve myself. Not to say that's gotten in my way, but that's a different way of working than most American actors work.
My family didn't like me going on the stage, and they didn't much like my being a writer, either.
Because I grew up on 'Star Wars', that was the best example of creating a full and rich world to me as a writer. When I was watching those movies as a kid, I wanted to know more about every damn character in that universe. There was always a hint that there was a story there that you just weren't getting to see.
Like many people, I kicked around, struggled to become a writer, finally got my first full-time job around 27, 28, at 'The Hill' newspaper. They hired me as a copy editor, which was kind of funny because I'm semi-blind because I have an eye disorder.
I have three brothers and one sister, and I'm the third child. Sometimes people say, 'It's only natural you would become a writer - your parents were English professors.' But my four siblings were brought up in the exact same household, and no one else became a writer or an English professor.
I majored in Southern history in college, and much of my early work at my first job - as a staff writer at 'Memphis' magazine - focused on race relations.
As an adult, I'll give a writer 50 pages. If the book doesn't interest me in 50 pages, I'll say the heck with it - there are just too many other things to read. A child won't give you 50 pages.
I was too prissy, too refined, too abstemious, too French to be a good American writer.
If you are going to be a writer, you have to have self-belief, every writer gets rejections, they say the difference between a successful and unsuccessful writer is an unsuccessful writer gives up, if you keep going you will succeed.
Siren voices tell me, 'You don't have to keep going on.' And then you think, 'I'm a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?' I don't know. I like being a writer.
I want to become a very good writer.
I'm not like a professional writer with professional skills. Songs kind of come into my head the same way they did when I was a kid. I say I'm an overgrown kindergarten kid. I work on songs.
Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.
I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.
There's no reason for somebody who's good at writing rap to be good at freestyling. They're different parts of your brain. You can develop both skills. I'm a much better writer.
Being a writer is a very private, internal process. Ultimately I am more the writer, being an introvert.
Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.
As a writer given to the old formalities of rhyme and meter, I sometimes feel endangered these days.
Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.
It's what every writer needs: a daybed.
I want to try and be instinctive as a writer and director.
When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.
One doesn't choose to become a writer. One is just born that way.
My function as a writer is to provide an atmosphere in which people can think wisely about what we're doing on this planet.
Being taken seriously, for a young writer, is a wonderful form of encouragement, but at the same time, I don't think one should ever feel like attempting a kind of artistic endeavor is beyond your scope just because of age or inexperience.
Scripture has always been a part of my life. My dad was a pastor. My mother was a speaker, writer, and teacher. I memorized Scripture from the time I was little.
If I could have married my wife and been a sports writer for the past 30 years, I wouldn't be sitting here - but I don't think I'd be sitting someplace where I was sorry to be sitting.
If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.
I don't have a writer's room. I write all the shows myself. Ninety-one episodes a season, I'm sitting there at the computer writing and writing and writing because I want the voice to be authentic so that the audience is hearing from me and not other writers.
When a writer makes something, it's theirs forever. That is the magic for me.
I'm more interested in character than events. I've observed that about myself as a writer. I find events, even the most dramatic sort, not to be such fertile ground.
I used to be a writer with superstitions worthy of a professional baseball player: I needed a certain desk chair and a certain armchair and a certain desk arrangement, and I could only get really useful work done between 8 P.M. and 3 A.M. Then I started to move, and I couldn't bring my chairs with me.
I think that the difference between 'The Sopranos' and the shows that came before it was that it was really personal. There had been a lot of dramas, a lot of really good ones, a lot of really bad ones, but they were always franchise shows about cops, or doctors, or lawyers. They weren't about the writer himself.
I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.
After I did 'Mr. Show,' I was basically just a writer for a while. I was really young, and I kinda was like, wow, I'm 27 and I was already on this iconic show, and now I can just coast. But no one likes coasting, because you have to fill your day with stuff.