Writer Quotes

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.

Poe is the only impeccable writer. He was never mistaken.

The same tools that make any writer good, plus a cheerful willingness to suspend belief.

At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.

What writer wants to make compromises with story? Story is the only reason you're in it.

I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.

Before I'm a writer, I'm definitely a reader and when I read memoir, I really want it to be true.

Two wrongs may not make a right, but a thousand wrongs make a writer.

When you're in the States and you're a writer and you've got money and you walk into a bank, you're a bum with money.

Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.

I'm a fast writer.

I could tell it was a popular move as a writer to walk down the bass lines while you were writing a song.

A writer has to be driven crazy to help him to see. A writer needs his poisons.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

And I think one way or another it's evident to those who work with me that as a writer, a director, a friend, as somebody's there that's very anxious to get the movie made.

I'm a writer, not a genre.

I can't imagine a more fulfilling thing for a writer than that you've made a strong impact on the lives of other people. Just because I've heard it before does not mean I don't want to hear it one more time.