I do gravitate toward 19th century writers, and I never mind being compared with some of the most memorable writers from that era. I mean, George Eliot is my absolute heroine.
After so many years, I've learned that being creative is a full-time job with its own daily patterns. That's why writers, for example, like to establish routines for themselves.
There are dozens of great American writers who write about the family.
Writers of feminist dystopian fiction are alert to the realities that grind down women's lives, that make the unthinkable suddenly thinkable.
My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.
Ninety-five percent of all writers who write do not get published, but 100 percent of all writers write because they have a voice in their head. The vast majority of writers simply write because they have to.
Writers who pretend that everything they're doing is completely new are full of it.
There aren't too many people out there who can start one of my books and not finish it. I don't think too many writers can say that.
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.
For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.
I think writers of memoirs need to be respected for the bold decision they take to bare their lives open. That alone should be enough. The things I write about, if you notice, are sensitive issues for a lot of people. If I told you my age, they would get ideas. The next thing you know they'll be filing lawsuits against me.
You wanna do a lot of backstory for your character - as an actor, you wanna research that. But on the show, it's fun to remain in that naive place as you go along, and be able to continue to discover things about your character as the writers come up with them.
So I made a request. I said to the writers, I have a minor request that I just want to play a loser.
All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.
All writers, in all viewpoints, must choose which information and scenes will be presented, and in which order. In that sense, the author is always represented as a point of view in a work of fiction. His hand can always be detected by the discerning.
Sexism kind of predisposes us to see men's work as more important than women's, and it is a problem, I guess, as writers, we have to change.
When the writers themselves are a bit out of control, and their lives are collapsing around them, they seem to rejoice in misery and celebrate the wrong sort of things.
I'm transitioning to television and film, but ultimately, I want to have a stronger presence on the web and be able to curate the content that I want to see. To bring attention to other filmmakers and writers.
What great writers have done to cities is not to tell us what happens in them, but to remember what they think happened or, indeed, might have happened. And so Dickens reinvented London, Joyce, Dublin, and so on.
There are a lot of writers who find a groove and spend a career mining that vein. I seem to be exactly the opposite.
Once anthropology and geology had opened up the pre-recordkeeping darkness of humanity's long, slow, sustained infancy as suitable grounds for speculation, writers began trying to imagine human existence as it must have been with only stone-age technology.
Dan Curry is the funniest guy in the world. I can sit in a room with him for hours, and he's just cracking me up constantly. And Kitao is the next Terry Gilliam. A lot of comedy directors are just comedic writers, but they don't have any sense of aesthetic or visual vocabulary.
New York was the Promised Land growing up. Writers were gods! The great gods of American culture... I thought.
I admire writers such as Elmore Leonard who can nail a character in three or four lines of dialogue, so he doesn't need pages of back story or clumsy exposition.
I did a lot of studying of great writers. I read that Hemingway rewrote 'The Sun Also Rises' 39 times.
I'm always interested in what classic crime writers got into when they stepped away from the genre stuff they were known for. That's why 'Mildred Pierce' is like noir without any real crime.
As writers, we do our best to conjure a world so vivid that the reader can practically walk through it - but we're still only using words and relying on readers to do a lot of work of imagining. Providing pictures as well as words offers a whole new dimension to the experience of consuming a story.
Hundreds of years ago, the most beautiful women of Havana were only glimpsed stepping in or out of carriages on this street. The first foreign writers who arrived and saw this could never get past just how incredibly beautiful their feet were.
Years ago, the writers were telling me that I'd make the Hall of Fame, so I kind of prepared a speech. But somewhere along in the 28 years, it got lost.
I've been guilty of being in the writers' room and going too dark; other people have gone too wacky and zany.
I made the decision that I didn't want to spend my life in rooms and write about rooms, or else make books that are researched constructs. I think you do have to get out there and live it. Thriller and genre writers seem to understand this.
I'm an essayist. And this is a genre that has existed for a few thousand years. Ever heard of Cicero? So these rules that I'm working under are not mine but rather were established by writers who recognized the difference between the hard research of journalism and the kind of inquiry of mind that characterizes the essay.
I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.
Prior to 2009, when publishers scoffed at the ebook market, they offered writers contracts which gave us half of the money they made off ebook sales.
I think it's so fun when I get to work with women writers in particular because we really understand the core story or foundation as women. That's so important to me that the authenticity is there, you know, from the place that I speak from for my women. Having other females with me helps me dig deeper.
