Writer Quotes

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.

One likes to think one grows as a writer as one ages, else all you get is an "old" young writer. Beyond that is the changing landscape of the universe and the stories I choose to tell.

People love pretty much the same things best. A writer looking for subjects inquires not after what he loves best, but after what he alone loves at all.

The world is a crazy, beautiful, ugly complicated place, and it keeps moving on from crisis to strangeness to beauty to weirdness to tragedy. The caravan keeps moving on, and the job of the longform writer or filmmaker or radio broadcaster is to stop - is to pause - and when the caravan goes away, that's when this stuff comes.

I'm pleased to have outsold great writers. But I'm not insane - I realize I am a writer people buy to take on vacation.

The creative act is not pure. History evidences it. Sociology extracts it. The writer loses Eden, writes to be read and comes to realize that he is answerable.

A writer is not a confectioner, a cosmetic dealer, or an entertainer.