I have no problem selling books to media franchises and we do it all the time. The author must understand that he/she is a writer for hire and has no control over copyright or over editorial changes made to the text.
I'm not a very fancy person. I've been a writer a long time, and right now 'The Hunger Games' is getting a lot of focus. It'll pass. The focus will be on something else. It'll shift. It always does. And that seems just fine.
If I have a better idea, I say, 'Can we try one like this?' I try not to step on writers' toes, but ninety-nine percent of the time, it ends up in the movie, and sometimes it's the line that everyone remembers and quotes from the movie.
But he knew people and he was head writer for Have Gun Will Travel, and if you took those early Star Treks that we did and put us in a western wardrobe and put us on wagon train going west, we can say the same lines.
One of the things I had to learn as a writer was to trust the act of writing. To put myself in the position of writing to find out what I was writing. I did that with 'World's Fair,' as with all of them. The inventions of the book come as discoveries...
I don't trust novels with points, do you? If a novel is only about a point, the writer should just say it in as few words as possible so we can take it in and go back to watching 'The Bachelor' on television.
Truth be told, I didn't want to be on T.V. I was going to be a writer or producer or a director, and at the end of my sophomore year, my department chairman put me up for a job doing weekend weather in Syracuse, New York.
I don't think there's any topic a writer should feel afraid of tackling just because it has already been discussed. If you feel you have a fresh perspective and an understanding of a certain emotional truth, it's always worth writing.
Jamal: Man, what am I DOIN' in here, man? This ol' ghetto ass class got people in here lookin' like a bad rerun of cops!
Eddie Morra: [Talking about himself] You see, that guy was me not long ago. What kind of guy without a drug or alcohol problem looks this way? Only a writer, strangely enough.
Adult Pi Patel: Now we have to send our little boy to the middle of the Pacific. Writer: And make me believe in God. Adult Pi Patel: Yes, we will get there.
Ernest Hemingway: You'll never be a great writer if you fear dying, do you? Gil: Yeah, I do. I would say it's my greatest fear.
Zidler: ...And you're dallying with the writer. Satine: Oh, Harold, don't be ridicul... Zidler: I saw you together. Satine: It's nothing. It's just an infatuation. It's... it's nothing.
Writer: [subtitled version] While I am digging for the truth, so much happens to it that instead of discovering the truth I dig up a heap of, pardon... I'd better not name it.
Simply as a writer of books I'm thrilled and proud that Seattle should have raised, on a public vote, sufficient money to build a central library, and moreover to rebuild every other library in the city: 28 of them.
I didn't need to borrow money from the record company, because if I had my own publishing company, and I had my own writers, I'd have enough to get and do whatever I wanted to do.
Labels only confuse people. The smarter people recognize artists who transcend categories. But I always try to entertain. It's in my nature; writers are born to entertain. If that means working ostensibly within a genre, fine.
At the height of the British Empire very few English novels were written that dealt with British power. It's extraordinary that at the moment in which England was the global superpower the subject of British power appeared not to interest most writer...
I don't think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you're dead.
Pop science goes flying off in all kinds of fashionable directions, and it often drags a lot of SF writers with it. I've been led astray like that myself at times.
Perhaps writers should never be allowed to get together in a workplace context. It's not like studying computer science, after all. The emotions are at large, and are shared and are questioned. There is a vulnerability.
