Writer Quotes

Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.

I think it is probably more important to attend specialized conventions for a journeyman writer than any other, but it's useful at all stages of a career, if for nothing else, to find out how the industry is working at any given time.

The catchword I use with my classes is: The authority of the writer always overcomes the skepticism of the reader.

In high school, my goal was to be a writer for SNL, then I got into the acting.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.

I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.

I love the incredible variety of demands directing makes on you, from the entrepreneur to the hustler to the deal-maker to the writer; to directing actors and the camera and working with music, sound, marketing and promotion. It uses so many sides of your brain.

I think I had actually served my apprenticeship as a writer of fiction by writing all those songs. I had already been through phases of autobiographical or experimental stuff.

I've carved out a career for myself really as a writer.

Paul's the writer. Yeah, I wrote a little of that stuff, but that's just technically true. In spirit, and in essence of the truth, it doesn't matter. So I don't know, maybe I'm being foolish for not being technical. Yeah, I wrote a certain portion of the things.

Writer's block is for people who have the luxury of time.

Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.

I worked for half a cent a word. I'm not a fast writer to begin with, so for the first few years I had do other things.

Well, you just know, as a writer, I didn't really write one of the five best screenplays of the year. There were lots of brilliant screenplays; I was just one of the lucky ones who got nominated.

There's a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer's will to live.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

I'm a schoolteacher and a writer. So that's what I do.

The biography of a writer - or even the autobiography - will always have this incompleteness.

I've always felt that I would rather see an actor, writer, or musician's work, rather than actually know the person. If you know too much about an artist, it somehow lessens their ability to do their work as well.

Sylvester has a great popular sense, as good as any writer I've ever worked with. He knows what audiences want to see, and what they don't want to see.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

Travel definitely affects me as a writer.

Nothing would make me happier if Peter Falk would finally win his Oscar for this. Not just as the writer but as a fan and a friend. It would be so great.

A writer writes. Period. No matter if someone is buying your work or not.

The homosexual community wants me to be gay. The heterosexual community wants me to be straight. Every writer thinks, I'm the journalist who's going to make him talk. I pray for them. I pray that they get a life and stop living mine!

I've wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent. But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers' work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver.

My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.

Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.

The great thing about being a writer is that you are always recreating yourself.

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.