If you dig deep and keep peeling the onion, artists and freelance writers are the leaders in society - the people who start to get new ideas out.
In a repressive society, a writer can be deeply influential, but in a society that's filled with glut and repetition and endless consumption, the act of terror may be the only meaningful act.
There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers - encouraging them to die.
I hated L.A. for a long time, and I wanted to leave it. I had these fantasies of going to 'SNL' and falling in love with some writer on 'SNL,' of getting married and living in New York.
I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.
Action, reaction, motivation, emotion, all have to come from the characters. Writing a love scene requires the same elements from the writer as any other.
I love working with the same actors repeatedly. That happens a lot. It's kind of inevitable, especially if you work with the same writers and directors and you start to form a company of actors. You gravitate towards each other.
My sister and brother are both writers as well. We are constantly discussing story and plot lines. And I love to discuss story ideas with my husband.
If I think about the writers I love or might be influenced by, I can't write at all, so I pretend there aren't any.
It is critical that writers who embrace the light of Christ's redemptive love characterize the darkness arrayed against us in a way that is consistent with its true nature.
Comics is still my first love. But I always did other kinds of writing, too, so I think of myself as a writer first.
I always tell people I write songs, but I'm a writer. It's a difference. I can write songs to music, but I can write a story. I can see ideas spark in me.
A lot of crime fiction writing is also lazy. Personality is supposed to be shown by the protagonist's taste in music, or we're told that the hero looks like the young Cary Grant. Film is the medium these writers are looking for.
Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis Thomas, who is no longer alive but is just heroic to me.
Accountants, machinists, medical technicians, even software writers that write the software for 'machines' are being displaced without upscaled replacement jobs. Retrain, rehire into higher paying and value-added jobs? That may be the political myth ...
I'm not one of those writers I learned about who get up in the morning, put a piece of paper in their typewriter machine and start writing. That I've never understood.
As a male writer, women are always what men pursue, and their world is always a mystery. So I always tried to present as many views as possible on women's worlds.
Writers of novels and romance in general bring a double loss to their readers; robbing them of their time and money; representing men, manners, and things, that never have been, or are likely to be.
If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.
I don't think that women necessarily always write like women. I was a writer on the 'Comedy Central Roasts' for a while, and I always wrote the jokes that people assumed the men would write.
Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.
