Writer Quotes

I'm a Hollywood writer, so I put on my sports jacket and take off my brain.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.

One thing I can tell you is this, that I am not a methodical writer.

Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet.

I'm a writer, not a professional runner. It's fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.

Look, in 1800 the sainted Thomas Jefferson arranged to hire a notorious slanderer named James Callender, who worked as a writer at a Republican newspaper in Richmond, Va. Read some of what he wrote about John Adams. This was a personal slander.

If you want to know why all writers are a little crazy read 'The Midnight Disease' by Alice W. Flaherty. She talks about the drive to write, writer's block, and the creative brain. I know what's wrong with me!

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me, writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are, you come out and hope that no one runs away.

Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.

My parents thought it was nice to develop my imagination, but they never seriously thought that anything would ever come of it. They said that I couldn't be an actress because I would be taller than all my leading men, so I thought I would be a writer instead.

I've learned so much as both a writer and a human.

I'm not on the run from anything and I'm not at all clear about what I'm running towards. But as some great writer put it, I want to be certain that when I arrive at death, I'm totally exhausted.

Contrary to what many writers imply about the process, nobody forces a writer to sell his work to the film industry.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

Actors are accustomed to doing exactly what the director or writer requests us to do, and rarely get involved in that part of the process.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

Words are the basic tools, if you are a writer.

David Mamet we all know is a great screenplay writer and playwright and a great director. If you like him, you like him. If you hate him, you really hate him. He's someone who's into controversy, you know what I mean? That's David Mamet.

I love movies. Movies have influenced me as a writer.

I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.

But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it's all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can't change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs.

The most original thing a writer can do is write like himself. It is also his most difficult task.

The Onion Field made a real writer. And then I knew it was over, I couldn't be a cop anymore.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

I never wanted to write. I just wrote letters home from a kibbutz in Israel to reassure my parents that I was still alive and well fed and having a great time. They thought these letters were brilliant and sent them to a newspaper. So I became a writer by accident.

Being fired was the best luck of my life. It made me stop and reflect. It was the birth of my life as a writer.

The process hasn't changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.