Writers Quotations | Page 6

It infuriates me that the work of white American writers can be universal and lay claim to classic texts, while black and female authors are ghetto-ized as 'other.'

I think writers process their own experiences through the characters and situations they write. So for Batman, I used my own experience of losing a loved one. Grief is a strange place; it's like an altered state. You might sleep too much, so you can see the dead in your dreams.

I think writers just can't come up with any new words for what we're doing, because we're not 'retro-' anything. Like, in 'Gold and a Pager,' we're not talking about what was current - pagers were cool to us, but they never stopped being cool; people just stopped using them.

I think writers have become hypnotised by the number of jokes on the page at the expense of character.

I think when writers play with dragons, we are simply doing what fantasy writers have always done.

I think the best writers use the language they use every day when they talk to friends. When we talk to each other, we tend to talk in short grabs rather than in long flowing sentences. I think that's not a bad way to write.

I think that fiction writers can write about anyone. If you are writing a character, and the only thing they are to you is their otherness, then you haven't written a character.

I think a lot of unpublished writers feel the same way. They're not getting anywhere, and nobody's listening to them. You do get frustrated.

I think a lot of times stereotypes come when there are disconnected white writers who maybe have two or three black friends, and they write black characters, and they put them in situations that are ridiculous.

I think it's so fun when I get to work with women writers in particular because we really understand the core story or foundation as women. That's so important to me that the authenticity is there, you know, from the place that I speak from for my women. Having other females with me helps me dig deeper.

I think throughout the 20th century, for some reason, serious writers increasingly had contempt for the average reader. You can really see this in the letters of such people as Joyce and Virginia Woolf.

I think that all research scientists think of themselves as belonging to a grand tradition, building on work that has been worked on since the very beginning of science itself. Whereas I'm not sure writers think of themselves in the same way.

I think television keeps on being a place where writers can go, and if they're successful, they can have their way, and they can have creative freedom.

I went to a very mean school and was bullied like crazy. I was a bit of a goth with purple hair, and I was also part of the drama group, which was filled with actors and writers and wasn't really accepted by the rest of the school.

I went without health insurance until 'Roger & Me,' basically - from about age 20 till about age 35. With 'Roger & Me,' I joined the Directors Guild and the Writers Guild, and since then I've had excellent health care managed by the union.

I think the writing for this book is extraordinary. And that's why we call it 'Above and Beyond,' because it really is above and beyond what we expected. Writers like (Kurt) Vonnegut and Tim O'Brien waited years after their service to write their books. There's an immediacy and rawness to this book that makes it so compelling.

I think the most important thing we as writers can do is figure out how we define what success will mean to us and focus on that.

I think ethnic and regional labels are insulting to writers and really put restrictions on them. People don't think your work is quite as universal.

I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.

I suppose it's easier for most writers to create and vivify characters of their own gender.

I say that glorious prose is a fine and laudable thing, but without an enthralling story, it's just so much verbal tapioca. Simply put, the best books have both, and the best writers disparage neither.

I resent people who say writers write from experience. Writers don't write from experience, though many are hesitant to admit that they don't. I want to be clear about this. If you wrote from experience, you'd get maybe one book, maybe three poems. Writers write from empathy.

Our city and our world is so much more complicated. All of the writers in our series chose to address the negative parts of their lives, but they also wanted to show that you have people struggling to make beauty.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

Our awards are purely voted on by writers, so you're getting what the writers think are the best-written films of the year. Ironically, we parallel closely with the Oscars.

Other writers tell me about these bushel baskets delivered at the front door. If I've gotten 50 letters over the last 18 years, I'd be surprised.

People like Eugene Debs, Helen Keller, Emma Goldman, Jack London and Upton Sinclair were wonderful writers who joined the movement against war and injustice, against capitalism and corporate power. That was a very exciting period in American history.

Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish.

Someone once said that history has more imagination than all the scenario writers in the Pentagon, and we have a lot of scenario writers here. No one ever wrote a scenario for commercial airliners crashing into the World Trade Center.

Someone like me, with my height, my look, the sound of my voice, it's been great to play someone who's smart, ... She's one of the smartest people in the room, and the writers are writing for that.

Some journal writers choose to password-protect their site, which is either an incredibly responsible act or a paranoid one.

That '70s Show is one of our longest-running hit comedies. The show's success is definitely a testament to the creativity and dedication put forth each week by the talented cast, outstanding writers and producers and the great crew. There are a lot of things about the '70s we'd like to forget--especially those involving polyester--but this series has been a wonderful look back at this most memorable decade.

My parents had never been to Germany. But I knew what I didn't want to write about, and I didn't want to write about Edinburgh. A lot of writers find Edinburgh fascinating, but I never did. As a matter of fact, I couldn't wait to get away from it.

My Writers Guild of America card is one of my proudest possessions. I was given it after being invited to write the script for a film of my last novel, 'Me Before You,' which is being made by MGM. Whenever I look at it, I think, 'I'm a Hollywood writer!'

My passion for that recovery began when I was in grad school. I was assigned to read the women poets that Emily Dickinson read and I was hooked. I began obsessively reading 19th-century novels by women. There was a richness, humor and a detailed portrayal of the plight of women in 19th-century America. It became a cause for me to bring the possibility of teaching these writers at the college level to the forefront.

My parents were both writers - they would type their manuscripts sitting side by side on the veranda of our house near Watford - so I wanted to do something different. I wanted to be a bluegrass singer, an architect, a landscape gardener, or to do something with animals.

Living in New York City is one constant, ongoing literary pilgrimage. For 20 years, I lived among the ghosts of great writers and walked where they had walked.

Living in a cultural milieu where the foreign writers most widely available and admired were Russian, I came very late to postwar American writers, and I had great trouble with the canonically exalted white male writers I tried first.

I wonder if it's in the nature of fiction writers to never quite see their own lives as 'real,' since we are always making stuff up!

I was thinking of writers living in East Europe before the Berlin Wall came down. They wrote fantastic stuff but were dealing with a situation that was almost impossible to deal with, but they found a way.

It feels a little scary for most writers because when you're writing, you're completely in charge you can say this book is all mine, it's my world. Whether giving over some of that has any monetary value or not, we'll see.

I think Paris smells not just sweet but melancholy and curious, sometimes sad but always enticing and seductive. She's a city for the all senses, for artists and writers and musicians and dreamers, for fantasies, for long walks and wine and lovers and, yes, for mysteries.

I think 'Overlord' has definitely benefited because I work with every single level designer, and working where we have space to tell the story. That's what it's all about - getting writers and storytellers involved in the team and being a back and forth process.

I think publishers need to be the ones that publish the books and control that process: finding writers, helping them with their work, finding readers. I think writers need that.

I think probably in the earlier parts of my career I was influenced by writers such as Hawthorne and Melville - the American classics.

I think of myself as a producer. As a producer and as a showrunner, I already understand what it meant to gather people into a room and step back, to create the boundaries of 'everything's okay' to allow TV writers to go to their craziest places.

It doesn't mean, I think, so much that the workshop generates the writer as that writers are increasingly drawn to them as a kind of apprenticeship period, a place where they can spend a couple of years improving their skills.

I tell myself that some names can be mistakes, like Mxyplyzyk, a store in New York that lost customers because few could spell its name to look up the address. I tell myself that lots of writers agonize over titles, and often get them wrong at first.

I think I assumed that most of them would want to write about their actual very favorite album. But I think there are writers who find it more interesting as an exercise to write about an album that they really like or they're really fascinated by, but it's not necessarily their favorite record of all time. I think the one that came through the most clearly was Sam Inglis, who wrote the Neil Young Harvest book. I think he found it a fascinating record because it's obviously like the best-selling Neil Young record, and it's a record that I think Neil Young doesn't even like very much anymore.

I think I have a pretty goofy profile for a writer. It seems to me most writers were reading 'Little Women' when they were 6 months old. At the age of a lot of my readers, I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I didn't read much.

I think great writers should write great shows, and I have trouble with, like, what you are in life shouldn't automatically make you what you do in your art. It doesn't necessarily translate.

John was an incredibly important writer, both in his own right, and as a leading advocate for writers and artists with disabilities. It's a terrible, terrible loss.

It is essential that computers are protected from unauthorized access by remote hackers. All computer users need to patch against these flaws in Microsoft's software as quickly as possible, before hackers and virus writers try and take advantage of them.

That was never designed to be a staple of the show that we would revisit week after week after week. That was something that these two sort of brought to life, and that's a perfect example of something that they did that then informed the writers that this is a part of the show.

That's the thing: once it's in their hands, it's not my book anymore, it's theirs. I have no idea what happens when they start to digest it. So when someone writes me to explain how they read it, what it was like, what they enjoyed, there's a thrill. Writers who don't make their email addresses public are missing out on something wonderful.

I was quite taken with her, because I'd never seen the African influence in dance with that kind of strength and artistic power. It impacted my soul. No one had reached those heights. She was the definitive black dance company. She moved among the highest intellectuals of black culture, all the writers and painters and literary folk.

I was a screenwriting major at Georgetown, and I was in class with some really strong writers like Jonathan Nolan, who co-wrote 'The Dark Knight' with Chris, his brother. He wrote 'The Prestige,' the story for 'Memento.'

M F K Fisher is the dowager queen of writers on browsing and slicing.

You just couldn't write short stories after Hemingway in the 19th-century manner, which is what American writers did until the 1920s.

Wine writers have been around for almost as long as there has been wine, but in the past, generally speaking, most wine writing was uncritical and emphasized wine as a romantic, historic beverage. Criticism and comparative tastings were eschewed for fear of offending the trade, which most writers depended upon for survival.

Well, certainly I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

We were looking for the same objectives that the baseball writers and the veterans committee look for -- longevity, an outstanding career and character.

We couldn't do this without the generosity of the writers in this state. But they always seem so excited to get together with each other and their readers in this setting.

We have to think of society's portrayal of salesmen as not true to life but as that great American character making it against the odds, the hustler. It's not that we tend to think of salespeople as evil hucksters, but that the writers and directors see them as characters relying only on their wit, character and drive.

We have to think big. We have to imagine big, and that's part of the problem. We're letting other people imagine and lead us down what paths they want to take us. Sometimes they're very limited in the way their ideas are constructed. We need to imagine much more broadly. That's the work of a writer, and more writers should look at it.

While apartheid was in operation, the set-up was a gift for writers if you were looking for a big theme.

We are thrilled to have Peter on-board to kick off this historic comic project. He is one of the most acclaimed comic book writers working today. The millions of Dark Tower fans are certainly in for a real treat.

We are the only school in America, drama school in America that trains actors, writers and directors side by side for three years in a master's degree program, and we want them - to expose them to everything.

We had all these famous writers in Sweden and from all over the world home at dinner. I wanted to be a writer, and I wanted to be a highbrow writer as my father. He never, ever read anything like crime novels. He wrote biographies of Dante, James Joyce, August Strindberg and Joseph Conrad.

Virus writers are always looking for new tricks to entice innocent computer users into running their malicious code. This latest ploy feeds on people's desire for the latest news.

V. S. Pritchett was one of the most admired, fun, talked-about writers of the 20th century: he was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for his work with prose. He was born in 1900, wrote till he died in 1997, and has been tidily forgotten ever since. This is a real shame.

Typically on a TV series, the writers on a show are writing for their life almost every episode. When someone sits down to write a Netflix show, they know there's going to be a 13th hour.

You know, all writers are vampires and ... they'll look around and they watch you when you're not even thinking they're watching you and they'll slip stuff in.

You know I think many writers are dangerous to the establishment. I mean, they go against all the rules that you're told writing.

Unfortunately writers take a very small part of the profit on their books, and I think in the e-book world there is a real danger they will take even less, unless they are vigilant and robust about protecting their own interests.

Unfortunately, there's still a lot of beginning writers who think you can just write your first draft and hand it in.

To become the best possible writer, one must keep learning and building up networks, which is why the publication and the mentors are so important. Our mentors and alumni especially provide a really good literary network that most writers cannot obtain.

When the writers themselves are a bit out of control, and their lives are collapsing around them, they seem to rejoice in misery and celebrate the wrong sort of things.

We plan to make three feature-length movies for theatrical release this year, probably comedies because that is what works well for local production and we already have a stable of good comedy writers from our television sitcoms.

When aspiring writers ask me about how they should target their writing, I tell them to pay no attention to that kind of thing. It will restrict you. You will end up falling into stereotypes in an effort to tailor your work toward a perceived genre category.

The readers and the hearers like my books, But yet some writers cannot them digest; But what care I? For when I make a feast I would my guests should praise it, not the cooks

There are a number of writers who believe it is their duty to throw as many curve balls at the reader as possible. To twist and twist again. These are the Chubby Checkers of crime fiction and, while I admire the craft, I think that it can actually work against genuine suspense.

There is a very conservative element of crime writers that don't recognise what I do is crime fiction.

There is a tendency for writers to be most exciting by whatever they just wrote. Sometimes that excitement is warranted. Sometimes on further listen it's not as good as something they did a couple of years ago, but it's just not in their sights at that particular time.

Writing provides no guarantees. And writers who stay with writing do it for reasons that are larger than self.

When writers stop to sharpen pencils or get up and make coffee to procrastinate, they still stay in their heads with their characters. But when you zip over to read email or check your Facebook page, you get zapped out of the fictive dream. It's brutal on my writing.

When writers meet they are truculent, indifferent, or over-polite. Then comes the inevitable moment. A shows B that he has read something of B s. Will B show A? If not, then A hates B, if yes, then all is well. The only other way for writers to meet is to share a quick pee over a common lamp-post.

The deaf culture is portrayed very accurately on 'Switched at Birth' because the writers did the opposite of the norm. They did their homework before portraying anything on television.

The deaf community is nearly never portrayed accurately on television/film because most writers never took the time to immerse themselves in the deaf culture before portraying it on television. They also never got to know their deaf actors.

The fact that the writers and producers have give us the opportunity to mold these characters into something that is not everyday has been a pleasure.

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

There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.

There are many people who say, 'I write for myself.' I think that if you write and publish, then you write for your readers, not just for yourself. Many writers say that they write to be loved. I place myself among those writers.

When I was first in Czechoslovakia, it occurred to me that I work in a society where as a writer everything goes and nothing matters, while for the Czech writers I met in Prague, nothing goes and everything matters

Too many writers of fiction don't give the reader enough credit.

The past is full of examples of renegade writers who were overlooked in their time not only because their work didn't fit neatly into potted categories but also because they avoided the self-promotional efforts of their peers.

There are a lot of writers who just want to do their own thing and avoid the rest of the Marvel Universe. But for me that was one of the things I loved about Marvel: that shared universe. So of course you would run into a mutant in Manhattan. You would run into another hero in Manhattan. For me, I figured why not? Why not have that fun?

...there are a lot of successful writers who never even see their work done.

There are a few writers whose lives and personalities are so large, so fascinating, that there's no such thing as a boring biography of them - you can read every new one that comes along, good or bad, and be caught up in the story all over again.

There are important things going on in the Stargate universe. I think the writers have a few more pressing storylines to put to paper.