For a writer, and particularly a writer of my genre, which is the fantastical, I think that it's to my advantage to feel remote from and disconnected from the world of deal making.
There's a half-conscious state you enter when you're actually generating prose, and you are simply a better writer in that place. In fact it's the only place where you even are a writer.
The whole ecosystem of celebrity has broken down for writers. If you go back to the '50s, '60s, and '70s, writers were on TV a lot, and they were allowed to misbehave a lot.
A writer doesn't dream of riches and fame, though those things are nice. A true writer longs to leave behind a piece of themselves, something that withstands the test of time and is passed down for generations.
I've become a day writer: most people start as night writers, and I used to be, but something happened to my endocrine system. I do miss the 3 A.M. writing jags.
What has always been at the heart of film making was the value of a script. It was really the writer who could make or break a film. But as we all know, the writer has always been at the bottom of the creative heap.
In my view, a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.
I've learned to accept that I'm a children's writer, even if it's not what I set out to become. It's what I should have been all along, and I'll stay in this role as long as I'm a writer.
There is the intent of the writer and the interpretation by the artist. What the writer intended and what the artist interprets is not a 1-to-1 translation. It's a crossing of ideas that generates the stories that you see in print.
Ernest Hemingway: If you're a writer, [slams fist on table] Ernest Hemingway: declare yourself the best writer. But your not, as long as I'm around, unless you want to put the gloves on and settle it.
C. K. Dexter Haven: I thought all writers drank to excess and beat their wives. You know one time I secretly wanted to be a writer.
'American Playhouse' is very supportive of writers. That's really why writers like to write for 'American Playhouse' for very little money. They care about making your play, your script, not some network production. We're treated like playwrights, no...
Science fiction offers an intensely bracing angle of view for writers to adopt, especially in a time of constant innovation and crisis, and it is a scandal that in 1999 so many writers have written it and continue to write it in obscurity.
In Japan, the writers have made up a literary community, a circle, a society. I think 90 percent of Japan's writers live in Tokyo. Naturally, they make a community. There are groups and customs, and so they are tied up in a way.
My teacher Tom Spanbauer, the man who got me started writing in his workshop, used to say: 'Writers write because they weren't invited to a party.' That always struck so true, and people always nod their heads when they hear that. Especially writers.
I was 12. Our ,teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.
Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.
A real writer learns from earlier writers the way a boy learns from an apple orchard -- by stealing what he has a taste for, and can carry off
It's also true, however, that having conquered the regional writer ghetto, I am now intent on conquering the nationalist writer ghetto and moving out into the world more.
I became a writer when I learnt how to read -- how to listen; how to see, smell, touch, and feel. But not everyone who knows these things, not everyone who writes, or publishes, is a writer. Writing is in the soul.
Long before the idea of a writer's conference was a glimmer in anyone's eye, writers learned by reading the work of their predecessors. They studied meter with Ovid, plot construction with Homer, comedy with Aristophanes; they honed their prose style...
