[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.
I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.
You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing.
You're meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there's a lot to be said for a very happy one that just lets you get on with it.
I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.
As a writer, you sit around a computer all day, and it's too easy to open another tab and keep Rotten Tomatoes there.
I believe that the writer should tell a story. I believe in plot. I believe in creating characters and suspense.
What a writer has to do is write what hasn't been written before or beat dead men at what they have done.
Feminism is teaching. I've gotten a lot of pleasure pushing younger writers that I've met and worked with.
No book that is written for an external purpose is going to be a passionately felt book for the writer or the reader. I don't see the point in doing that.
Comedy will always be central to what I do, it's just an instinct for me, but I am a writer and always have been.
I ended up on 'Heroes' because I auditioned for the part like everybody else, but the writers were writing the role of Daphne, which was originally called Joy.
I kind of romanticized what it was like to be a writer and director when I was in my early twenties. Working as a production assistant knocked that right out of me.
If a movie doesn't even have financing yet, they'll do a table read for it at a casting director's office with actors, for the producer and the writer, just to hear if the movie is working.
There are plenty of writers who are going to become a director after their next job, but no one will believe you're a director unless you believe it.
A lot of the traditional sitcom stuff I did - I think I could have gone that route when I was younger as a staff writer, and I just didn't want to.
I've covered so much Tom Waits. He's one of my favorite writers. I have a real affinity to how he writes.
There are probably writers who are much more visual than I am and some who are less. I like to think of myself as a happy medium.
Like most writers, I find the Web is a wonderful distraction. Who doesn't need that last minute research before writing?
He asked, "What makes a man a writer?" "Well," I said, "it's simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.
take a writer away from his typewriter and all you have left is the sickness which started him typing in the beginning
