There are two classes of women in Soviet Russia. There is the professional class, which has taken the place of the nobility and includes government officials, artists, doctors, composers and writers as well as former members of the old nobility whose sympathy is with the Soviets, and also the peasant class.
I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.
Music and literature have always and continue to be massive influences. Writers such as Seamus Heaney and Frank McGuinness. I have always admired the humanitarians that I knew growing up in Derry whose influence steered me in the direction of some of the work that I have chosen in the past.
Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.
Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.
Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.
My literary heroes all wrote about L.A.: Joseph Wambaugh, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler were the three writers that made me want to be a writer.
Writers write to influence their readers, their preachers, their auditors, but always, at bottom, to be more themselves.
And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.
I think there is a chance that Indian writers in America will start producing very interesting books in the years to come.
I have no agenda except to be funny. Neither I or the writers profess to offer any worldly wisdom.
A lot of people say writers start losing their powers after 60 or 65. But I look at the best-seller list and see a book by that 14-year-old gymnast, Dominique Moceanu, and I think, 'Now, what's she going to tell the world? And these 25-year-old rock stars, what are they going to tell the world?'
I don't like to hurt people's feelings, and I don't like to knock other writers as a matter of principle.
I'm envious of writers and musicians. I think it must be so difficult. Not just the frustration, but the discipline.
I just can't say enough about the actors having faith and trust in the writers and the writers having faith and trust in the actors.
I'm the opposite of those writers who believe that my work is sacrosanct and cannot be touched.
It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.
I'm not famous for my back story investigations; I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script.
I've become a day writer: most people start as night writers, and I used to be, but something happened to my endocrine system. I do miss the 3 A.M. writing jags.
Writers speak stench.
Writers will happen in the best of families.
There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.
The writers want to know were you made your mistake, no how well your curve is breaking.
Writers of historical fiction are not under the same obligation as historians to find evidence for the statements they make. For us it is sufficient if what we say can't be disproved or shown to be false.
One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support, and it's really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here, where they're all trying to murder each other.
Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.
The first writers are first and the rest, in the long run, nowhere but in anthologies.
I do not write by any set time schedule. I realize there are many writers who follow a daily regime where they arise at 6:00 a.m., do some sort of exercise, eat breakfast and then sit down and produce words for a three to four hour period.
I'm not sure the risks I take are any different from what other writers take, since we all serve at the pleasure of the reader.
I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.
Science fiction offers an intensely bracing angle of view for writers to adopt, especially in a time of constant innovation and crisis, and it is a scandal that in 1999 so many writers have written it and continue to write it in obscurity.
Here I am paying big money to you writers and what for? All you do is change the words.
I know that many writers have had to write under censorship and yet produced good novels; for instance, Cervantes wrote Don Quixote under Catholic censorship.
I think there are a lot more writers who are actors than you know; they just don't have roles on famous TV shows that you recognize.
I'm interested in how artists and writers do this, using art as therapy. Escaping into the worlds we create. We're all victims and few of us are truly free.
There are times when the writers ask us to improvise. Sometimes the animators are inspired by what you do, and sometimes you are inspired by what the animators do.
