Writers Quotes

What I take from writers I like is their economy - the ability to use language to very effective ends. The ability to have somebody read something and see it, or for somebody to paint an entire landscape of visual imagery with just sheets of words - that's magical.

My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

I've always seen it as the role of an artist to drag his inside out, give the audience all you've got. Writers, actors, singers, all good artists do the same. It isn't supposed to be easy.

I do enjoy working with writers.

Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be hard to deny that, for whatever reasons, a lot of SF writers come from Anglo or European backgrounds.

Kennedy was a man who liked writers and even I got invited to the White House.

I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.

Our principal writers have nearly all been fortunate in escaping regular education.

Writers may be disreputable, incorrigible, early to decay or late to bloom but they dare to go it alone.

I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.

Some editors are failed writers, but so are most writers.

I've had the odd good luck of starting slowly and building gradually, something few writers are allowed anymore. As a result I've seen each of my books called the breakthrough. And each was, in its way.

It was really written as most, I think, books are by writers - for themselves. There was something that just had to be written, in a way that it had to be written. If you know what I mean.

Writers mean more than they say and say more than they mean.

What we need is more women writers, writing for older women. There are some actresses who have production companies and create their own material, and I truly admire that.

I kind of thought the writers were starting to take Taylor and make her kind of down and dirty.

I'm more influenced by my own interests than anyone else's. Writers have to entertain themselves, or they can't entertain anyone else.

So when I got the chance to do my first talk show, 50 years ago last month, I never had any writers. There was no budget - it was just me and the camera and my friend who was the director. I talked about what I'd done that week.

The writers have slowly taken the show, with subjects other gay shows have dived right into, slowly. It was over a year before Will even started to date.

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running, teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.

In 1967, the students at San Francisco State invited the poet Amiri Baraka to the campus for a semester. He attracted other influential black writers such as Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, Eldridge Cleaver. What emerged was something we called the community communications program. That's how I got involved; I got involved in a little play.

Some writers hate to go to trials, but I love trials.

People don't want to listen to a celebrity tweeting about their charities and shows. That's why comedy writers do well - we put out little funny ideas.

There are plenty of clever young writers. But there is too much genius, not enough talent.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

George was getting alot of independence for himself in those days. He was writing more, and wanted things to go his way - where, when we first started things basically went John and Paul's way. You know, 'cuz they were the writers.

Some writers would be kinder than others, I'm sure. Hopefully they might describe my techniques as a mixture of tried and tested formulas - if it aint broke don't fix it - and unexpected twists.

Writing headlines is a specialty - there are outstanding writers who will tell you they couldn't write a headline to save their lives.