Writers Quotes

Writing is no dying art form in America because most published writers here accept the wisdom and the necessity of encouraging the talent that follows in their footsteps.

Writers, as they gain success, feel like outsiders because writers don't come together in real groups.

This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.

Like most struggling writers trying to get their scripts commissioned, I had to do something odd to pay the rent. So, aged 21, I started up my own small cheesecake company in Philadelphia.

As for goals, I don't set myself those anymore. I'm not one of these 'I must have achieved this and that by next year' kind of writers. I take things as they come and find that patience and persistence tend to win out in the end.

The great writers of aphorisms read as if they had all known each other well.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

Unfortunately, there are writers whose only concern is how good they could make themselves look on a title.

Nobody is surprised that women writers accurately represent male characters over and over again, no doubt because everybody knows that women understand men much better than vice-versa.

Country people give me more than writers, and country places than towns.

Sixty percent of all Indians live in urban areas, but nobody's writing about them. They're really an underrepresented population, and the ironic thing is very, very few of those we call Native American writers actually grew up on reservations, and yet most of their work is about reservations.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

I think my fascination is less with genre figures than with writers in general.

Theater is still a medium which attracts young writers. You'd think that it would be all over by now, with television and film. But it's not.

Largely this is a class thing - writers tend to be cosseted little middle-class kiddies who think that the world owes them a royalty cheque. But just doing it - being in your room for years on end, locked in your head, alone with invented ghosts - it weakens and softens the body. And I know I can't just live in my head.

When Ted Williams was here, inducted into the Hall of Fame 37 years ago, he said he must have earned it, because he didn't win it because of his friendship with the writers. I guess in that way, I'm proud to be in this company that way.

Yeah, writers do hate writing.

For a country to have a great writer is like having a second government. That is why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

I love writers all across the board, but one who influenced me very directly at the beginning was Mary Renault.

A lot of our writers, like Conan O'Brien, moved on to other things.

It's definitely true that there are a lot of the devices we used on 'Star Trek,' that came out the imagination of the writers, and the creators that are actually in the world today.

Dave and I had been song writers in Nashville, trying to get around, out hustling, trying to meet people. We randomly met Hillary out in town one night. She said she was a singer. I asked her if she would like to write some songs with Dave and me, and a week later she came over. Instantaneously we had this chemistry.

The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power.

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.

It's also that comedians don't have the kind of narcissism that actors have. They're writers who perform their own material. It's more interesting. And they're sexy because they risk more. Stand-up comedians risk more than anyone.

I grew up with an artist father, and my parents' friends were also mainly artists or writers, so he connects what I do with his example.

Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.

You get ideas from daydreaming. You get ideas from being bored. You get ideas all the time. The only difference between writers and other people is we notice when we're doing it.

Get more women producers, writers, directors. Why should we expect men to do it for us? They can't.

There are some good songs, but not the kind of song-writing that I remember, that I like. Springsteen still does it. Paul Simon, and there are also good writers, but that doesn't dominate the charts.