You need the words, you need the script, you need the material, you need the commitment, you need the passion, it's like we depend on writers, we depend on producers, directors depend on us and once things are in the divine order as they happen.
You know Seth and Evan, they were lead writers for 'Pineapple Express', and they are great at mixing things up. Taking different genres and mish-mashing them up to create something dynamically new. They'll throw comedy at you, but with a dash of horror and fright that is supposed to make you shocked and scared.
I just have a thing for writers. Maybe it because I'm just so not a writer.
I think I have a pretty goofy profile for a writer. It seems to me most writers were reading 'Little Women' when they were 6 months old. At the age of a lot of my readers, I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I didn't read much.
When I began visiting Bordeaux in 1979, only a handful of writers were there to taste the wines in the spring (and nearly all were British).
I had neither expert aid nor advice. I studied no courses in writing; until a year or so ago, I never read a book by anybody advising writers how to write.
As writers become more numerous, it is natural for readers to become more indolent; whence must necessarily arise a desire of attaining knowledge with the greatest possible ease.
There are two MFA programs here at the University of Texas, and I read on the jury of both of them. And it's amazing to me how many really talented young writers seem to fear humor.
Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.
I think that most writers who wait until they're inspired to write are just waiting for the fear to subside.
What helps writers, and ultimately, obviously, helps the actors - who should serve the words that the writer puts on the page - is if the character has damages, because then the writers can cultivate and excavate, like a dentist going into a tooth.
I have learned so much from working with other poets, travelling and reading with them, spending days discussing poems in progress. There is the sense that we are all, as writers, part of something which is more powerful than any of us.
World War II is the greatest drama in human history, the biggest war ever and a true battle of good and evil. I imagine writers will continue to get stories from it, and readers will continue to love them, for many more years.
I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.
And that's another piece of advice I'll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go.
There are writers, and I know some of them, who are very disciplined. Who write, like, four pages a day, every day. And it doesn't matter if their dog got run over by a car that day, or they won the Irish sweepstakes. I'm not one of those writers.
I did what most writers do when something happens that's overwhelming, fascinating, moving, all of that. I didn't know what else to do about it except write about it.
Today there are millions of people making stuff and putting it into the world: that's become part of our identity and it shouldn't be limited to people who fancy themselves writers, or who are particularly witty or talented.
I'm one of those writers who tends to be really good at making outlines and sticking to them. I'm very good at doing that, but I don't like it. It sort of takes a lot of the fun out.
I actually very rarely see comedy myself, and although I admire the work of some comics, it does come from all over, so I'll get a charge out of some fiction writers and poets.
I really think that in the media world that we live in now, especially for writers, it has to be a conversation. With very few exceptions, it can't be this one-way, 'Here I am on the mountaintop preaching to all of you great unwashed readers in hopes of saving you.' It doesn't work that way.
I have daughters who are writers and actors but no musicians.
I think novels are profoundly autobiographical. If writers deny that, they are lying. Or if it's really true, then I think it's a mistake.
There's a long relationship between science fiction and the 'novel of ideas,' and I think writers of science fiction are able to draw on that tradition to take risks, to constantly raise the level of their ambition.
I began the way nearly everybody I ever heard of - I began writing poetry. And I find that to be quite usual with writers, their trying their hand at poetry.
Why would a lazy guy become a parent of five? Then again, why would creative people who inherently don't like change and criticism become writers, actors, or comedians? There's something about this process. I joke about it: My kids have made me a better person, and I only need, like, 34 more of them to be a really good guy.
We Negro writers, just by being black, have been on the blacklist all our lives. Censorship for us begins at the color line.
The mercury rule writers also ignored mercury's special qualities.
I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular 'ism', but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence.
Writers are always sort of threatening to direct, and sometimes they do, and sometimes they don't.
The American middle class's faith in personal comfort as an end in itself is, in essence, a denial of life. And it has been imposed upon American writers and playwrights strongly enough to cut them off from their deeper sources.
When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go AWOL, and then I've nothing to write.
I have been very, very fortunate on this show, on 'Suits,' where the writers do come to me, and they ask my comfort level and, if they want to push an envelope in a certain direction, if I'm okay with that. And, by and large, I am. I think it's important.
Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.
I wonder sometimes if the motivation for writers ought to be contempt, not admiration.
Comparing oneself with one's fellow writers is a bad idea. I would not review a fellow writer unless I had something terribly positive to say.
