Writer Quotes

I'm a much better writer for being a father.

As an artist, as an actor, as a writer, you have to use what's personal to you. You have to be personal about your work; otherwise, it doesn't ring true.

No, you're either born a writer, a storyteller, or you're not.

I've been writing stories since I was 12. 'Writer's Digest' was one of my writing teachers, actually.

I never really wanted to be an actor. And that was the beginning of it, I began to write things down and eventually became a writer on a television show.

Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.

I am more of a suspense writer. A mystery writer solves mysteries. I am a 'high suspense' writer.

I think you have an obligation to share what you know as a writer.

When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.

An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can't help it.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

TV writing is different than other mediums, involving the writer.

Sean's a great, great writer.

I had read too many memoirs that were written after the writer or the director was past his or her prime.

Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, 'I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.'

They're naughty, all those writers - they mess around with people. I know James Gandolfini got a bit fed up on 'The Sopranos': if he said anything in front of a writer, told them a story from his life, it could make its way into the script.

The writer studies literature, not the world.

My father was a really funny guy. He lived a good long life. And he was the reason I wanted to be funny and become a comedian and a comedy writer, so to say that he's somewhat of a mythic figure in my life would be an understatement.

I decided I would go to Chicago and try my luck as a writer after those eight months as a fireman.

I am a writer perhaps because I am not a talker.

The romantic idea is that everybody around a writer must suffer for his talent. I think a writer is a citizen of humanity, part of his nation, part of his family. He may have to make some compromises.

I don't call myself a writer.

I just finished writing an essay about William Maxwell, an American writer whose work I admire very much.

With two books a year, I don't have time for writer's block.

But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that.

What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?

One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing.

I think that everything you do helps you to write if you're a writer. Adversity and success both contribute largely to making you what you are. If you don't experience either one of those, you're being deprived of something.

But I think the real tension lies in the relationship between what you might call the pursuer and his quarry, whether it's the writer or the spy.