Writer Quotes

What no wife of a writer can ever understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of the window.

I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.

I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.

A writer who presents men and women as creatures truncated below the waist is exposed as one who goes about without his trousers saying, 'see, I have had my testicles removed.'

But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.

I'm a writer first and a woman after.

There's an inherent idea that if a Black executive producer and a Black director are going to do a movie based on a Black writer's book that everybody is going to be Black.

As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

I'm 82 years old, wherever I go everybody knows me, but here's why... I'm a merchandiser, I'm not just a writer, I stay in every avenue you can think of.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

I like 'Bewitched' off the first album because it's one of the happiest songs I've ever written and, as any writer will tell you, happy songs are a million times more difficult to write than sad songs.

When somebody asks me what I do, I don't think I'd say critic. I say writer.

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

I had always wanted to be a writer who confused genre boundaries and who was read in multiple contexts.

The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.

The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

I want to try and be instinctive as a writer and director.

I've got America's best writer for $300 a week.

And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it.

My dad is a bank president and my mom was an accountant and they didn't think that seeking the life of a freelance writer was very practical, you see. Of course, I was just as determined to do it.

When you have another actor as your boss, they understand how to communicate easier sometimes than just a writer.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

As a very experienced writer once told me, 'It's in the rewrites'.

By the time I would have graduated, at 22, I was a writer and featured performer on Saturday Night Live.

I find myself really feeling like it's possible that maybe the greater contribution I'm going to be able to make through this next phase of my life might be as a writer writing wonderful parts for women, or even writing wonderful parts for myself, you know?

I didn't want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.