All of us have a 'voice' inside where all inspired thoughts come from. When I talk to children and aspiring writers, I always ask them to turn off the TV and listen to that voice inside them.
I think that what's unique about sci-fi - at least from the view of a lot of Chinese writers - is that sci-fi is least-rooted in the particular culture that they're writing from.
There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
I always want to do something I haven't done before and get to work with other actors, writers, or directors that I want to work with.
I don't think I ever got the hang of the writers' room. I love collaborating with people, but I really do my best work alone, and I think I would want to - if I did something again, I think I'd want to take total ownership the way Aaron Sorkin or David Kelley does.
I try to read writers who are better than me because it inspires me to be better.
I feel it's very important to let individual writers' voices come through. But the character has to be consistent.
I love contemporary North American fiction and short fiction. My favorite writer is Jonathan Franzen, and my favorite writers of short fiction are George Saunders and Alice Munro.
Writers are a little below clowns and a little above trained seals.
We hear about the Gershwins, the Kerns, and the Berlins, but there were some great little writers like Theodore Morse, Charles K. Harris, and Ernest R. Ball, who wrote 'Let the Rest of the World Go By.'
At Sarah Lawrence, I realized that everybody was already what they were going to be. The painters were painting, the writers writing, the dancers dancing. And nobody wore any makeup. The art was uppermost.
If you're a writer, the insight of other writers - if there's some kind of Holy Grail message on how to deal with writer's block or how to deal with any problem that can come up - whether you're writing about yourself or a group of people, I find that very interesting.
Stargate by far is the top of the pile when it comes to Sci-Fi. The quality is great. They have really good writers, production design, lighting, wardrobe.
Every new generation of SF writers remakes cyberpunk - a genre often laced with dystopian subtexts - in its own image.
I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.
One thing that makes me very happy is to see the growing activism among chefs in America. Chefs like Tom Colicchio, Bill Telepan, and Rachel Ray and food writers like Michael Pollan have gone to Congress, indeed sometimes even have testified before Congress, have lent this support to Mrs. Obama's effort to combat childhood obesity.
A lot of our writers, like Conan O'Brien, moved on to other things.
For almost anyone who chooses to be a writer, since so very few writers are able to learn a living from their work that is equivalent to the living earned by the average dentist or accountant.
Denise Mina is probably one of the most gifted writers out there, whether it's mystery or literary or whatever label you want to give it.
Perhaps it is the language that chooses the writers it needs, making use of them so that each might express a tiny part of what it is.
If you look at most women's writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writer's description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. They're looking for certain things, because they know what women do to look a certain way.
But when I did think about it and looked at the whole package - the producers behind the show, the writers, the cast I would be working with - I would have been a fool to turn it down just because the role for me was another gay role.
I'm one of those writers who, when writing, believes she's god-and that she hasn't bestowed free will on any of her characters. In that sense there are no surprises in any of my books.
That's what I think is the neat thing about TV: how alive it is and how the writers respond to the stimulus that they're getting from the actual actors. Whereas a movie is more hermetically sealed.
Since then, I have just read and read - but, that said, I suppose there is a raft of writers to whom I return again and again, not so much because I want to write like them, even if I were capable of it, but simply for a sort of stylistic shot in the arm.
Writers are always selling somebody out.
'Billy on the Street' is a persona. It's crafted; it has writers. It's a mixture of performance art and comedy.
I always individuate myself from other writers who say they would die if they couldn't write. For me, I'd die if I couldn't read.
Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.
Crime fiction makes money. It may be harder for writers to get published, but crime is doing better than most of what we like to call CanLit. It's elementary, plot-driven, character-rich story-telling at its best.
I still feel the impulse to give young writers a hearing, and I believe I have played more unpublished compositions than any other band leader in the country.
Writers are looking for a story. Using your own life as the basis for a story gives it an association with reality that's a wonderful starting point.
There are many great writers out there and, actually, great scripts. The problem is - and this is what I've always felt, even when I got out of school and started reading scripts - the really smart, character-driven stuff tends to be smaller films, and they just don't get made.
I think I'm attracted to writers who tell us something about ourselves.
I went without health insurance until 'Roger & Me,' basically - from about age 20 till about age 35. With 'Roger & Me,' I joined the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild, and since then I've had excellent health care managed by the union.
The classical writers... playwrights, Jacobean, Elizabethan playwrights, all showed areas of all classes and how they live and painted them pretty authentically.
