A writer needs to ingest love to be passionate. Passion is a metabolite of love, and good writing is an active metabolite of passion.
About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.
There’s a writer for you,” he said. “Knows everything and at the same time he knows nothing.” [narrator]It was my first inkling that he was a writer. And while I like writers—because if you ask a writer anything you usually get an answer—...
I find that with any good run on a show with good writers, they put something on paper, and you put something back on film, and that affects what they put on the paper the next time.
What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?
There are some good songs, but not the kind of song-writing that I remember, that I like. Springsteen still does it. Paul Simon, and there are also good writers, but that doesn't dominate the charts.
A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.
I think it's great when writers get recognition; it doesn't happen very often. I just don't want that writer to be me. Let it be Aaron Sorkin or, you know, somebody good.
Most good fiction also has a character the writer seems to know more deeply than anyone can actually be known in life, but a few unusual writers can make something great without that.
I don't believe a poet has a better hold on truth or morality than a fiction writer has. And I don't think a fiction writer has anything over a journalist. It's all about the good word, properly inserted.
If you’re dating a writer and they don’t write about you — whether it’s good or bad — then they don’t love you. They just don’t. Writers fall in love with the people we find inspiring.
One of the qualities essential to writing exciting stories, whether for page or screen, is an ability to abandon one's morality. We simply cannot be good writers and good people. One must be able to access one's darkest self, one's venality and petti...
Prison always has been a good place for writers, killing, as it does, the twin demons of mobility and diversion
My advice for writers is to get a good day job. It takes the pressure off writing if you have a job that pays the bills.
I think Juan stopped short - he got halfway to the destination and got off the train. He is certainly an excellent writer and a good person, but I'm not a nationalist.
The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.
I was a better writer when I was teaching. I was constantly going over the basics and constantly reminding myself, as I reminded my students, what made a good story, a good poem.
And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.
Well, I'm a slow writer. For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I'd love to be more efficient, but I am not.
Bestseller doesn’t necessarily mean good writer. I think it takes 10,000 book sales to make the bestseller’s list, and at about 9 dollars a pop for my book, if I had an extra $90,000 dollars of disposable income, I’d be a bestseller tomorrow. B...
Read a lot. But read as a writer, to see how other writers are doing it. And make your knowledge of literature in English as deep and broad as you can. In workshops, writers are often told to read what is being written now, but if that is all you rea...
