I'm intrigued by films that have a singular vision behind them. A lot of studio movies have ten writers by the time they're done. You have a movie testing 200 times, making adjustments according to various people's opinions. It's difficult to have an...
I spent all my time on my movies worried that people were eating and that the schedule was being kept, so to have experts in those areas giving me the brain space as a writer and director is huge.
It's too bad that there aren't as many light comedies around in the movies as there were when I was making pictures like 'The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer.' The boys are just not writing them. Many writers are more serious now than they used to be, a...
I write plays and movies, I live and work at the borderline between word and image just as any cartoonist or illustrator does. I'm not a pure writer. I use words as the score for kinetic imagistic representations.
Paul Varjak: [giving his name at the police station] Paul Varjak. Varjak, V A R J A K. I'm a writer, W R I T E R.
There are writers out there who say they're writing a second series, and then you pick it up and it feels exactly the same, only the lead character is blonde instead of brunette.
I often compare putting a hotel together to old-time movie production. You come up with a story line, you hire the writer, the director, the stars, the set designer.
I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.
As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward.
There are certain books that should be taken away from young writers; that should be prised out of their clutching fingers and locked away until they are all grown up and ready to read them without being smitten.
Imagine a world in which no writer has written a literary novel in sixty years. Imagine a place where not a single person has read a book that is truly about the character at its center.
Because you're a crime writer you're asked to have a point of view on a lot of things, and I'm uncomfortable having public opinions on things that are not my professional area.
The thing is, emotion - if it's visibly felt by the writer - will go through all the processes it takes to publish a story and still hit the reader right in the gut. But you have to really mean it.
Offhand, the only North American writers I can think of who have come from a background of rural poverty and gone on to write about it have been Negroes.
Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.'
I did have imprinted on me the idea of trauma that changes things dramatically and suddenly. As a writer, I return to that again and again because it fascinates me, and it's where I come from, in a sense.
You can look at the New York Times Bestseller List and you can be pretty sure that the writers on that list don't know each other very well.
A writer's main tool is his memory - his own memory, the collective memory of his people. And the strongest memory is the one that is created by a wound to the heart.
As a writer I've learned certain lessons. One of them is to be careful about how you put a view, and to bear in mind how easily and readily you'll be misinterpreted.
As a writer, I have readers who will have a range of political views. I don't think they look to me for political guidance.
I myself am pathetically impressed when I meet writers of very long novels. How can they spend so many hundreds of hours at the miserable, lonely pastime of creating fiction?
