I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion, I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted, devoting hours and hours and hours to it.
But because we've all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.
As a freelance writer, I'd be asked to become an expert for various magazines on any subject, whether food or wine or history or the life span of veterinarians. I was completely unschooled in any of these things.
The humor is essentially dark for a cartoon and sophisticated. But at the same time, being a cartoon gives the writers more freedom than in a normal sitcom. It always pushes the line that, despite human failings, the Simpsons are really decent people...
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.
What makes revolutionary thought unique is its clarity and dignity, and its clear grasp of freedom and justice: simple, clear words that are understood without the need for any help from elite writers or thinkers.
I was encouraged to be imaginative and read, and it was a great childhood for a budding writer because I had the time and the freedom to go into a world of my own.
I believe that, in an ideal world, writers would feel free to write what matters to them without having to consider success, failure, the market, etc.
But whatever my failure, I have this thing to remember - that I was a pioneer in my profession, just as my grandfathers were in theirs, in that I was the first man in this section to earn his living as a writer.
I feel incredibly successful. I make a living as a writer and am able to help support a big family, my church, my bleeding-heart causes.
Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.
If somebody gave you several thousand dollars and nothin' to do but write, would you be a writer then? Would you tell your stories, your family's stories, then?
I don't think I would be a writer if I had stayed in Chile. I would be trapped in the chores, in the family, in the person that people expected me to be.
A young musician plays scales in his room and only bores his family. A beginning writer, on the other hand, sometimes has the misfortune of getting into print.
My family was all police and hard hats at the refineries; they didn't know what to think about me. So I became a closet writer.
Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.
I learned what I really love is making films, not the film business. I want to be on the set, meeting with writers, I want that freedom. I love it now.
I have several writer friends, but I don't involve them in my work process. I'm more likely to talk about the business of publishing with them.
Good writers are in the business of leaving signposts saying, Tour my world, see and feel it through my eyes; I am your guide.
Writing can be a very solitary business. It's you sat at a desk typing words into a computer. It can get lonely sometimes and lots of writers live quite isolated lives.
I am a sensitive writer, actor and director. Talking business disgusts me. If you want to talk business, call my disgusting personal manager.
