I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel - till I am - nothing. As it happens, I like it that way.
Those who generate fog are Wizards of Oz hoping desperately that nobody pulls the curtain to reveal a trembling little writer behind it. This seldom happens. Readers who dare to point out that incomprehensible writing can't be comprehended risk being...
Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.
During the writer's strike I was walking a line and ran into Jack Black and he said, 'We're doing Airborne 2!', and I asked, 'Are you kidding?', and he said, 'Yeah.' I like 'Airborne,' its very pure.
But when I did think about it and looked at the whole package - the producers behind the show, the writers, the cast I would be working with - I would have been a fool to turn it down just because the role for me was another gay role.
I got my Bachelor's degree in nursing and worked nine years - even taught nursing in a college - before I stopped and said to myself, 'This is not who I am. I am not really a nurse inside. I'm a writer.'
remember Stephen King's First Rule of Writers and Agents, learned by bitter personal experience: You don't need one until you're making enough for someone to steal ... and if you're making that much, you'll be able to take your pick of good agents.
Many people don't know that New Jersey is a fertile breeding ground for writers, some of them quite renowned. And I would wager that most would be truly startled to learn that the star in the Jersey firmament is - drum roll here - Newark.
The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.
Children's reading and children's thinking are the rock-bottom base upon which this country will rise. Or not rise. In these days of tension and confusion, writers are beginning to realize that books for children have a greater potential for good or ...
The natural creativity of the staff morphed 'The Daily Beast' very fast into what has become a newsroom. Aggregation lives on the Cheat Sheet, the video player, and in the breaking news slot in the first big box. The rest is all original, generated b...
If you want to make an audience laugh, you dress a man up like an old lady and push her down the stairs. If you want to make comedy writers laugh, you push an actual old lady down the stairs.
I dreamed of being an actress when I was a little kid because you don't know then that the writer writes everything the actor is saying. But as I got older, I got into college and became more aware that writing is another option, and I started gettin...
I want to photograph what I see and put it in a dramatic context. I'm an actor and a writer, and I want to tell these stories and present these shapes, colors and movements as I see them, as I see them serve a narrative. As I see that narrative serve...
At an early school, when I was about 5, they asked what we wanted to be when we grew up. Everyone said silly things, and I said I wanted to be an actress. So that was what I wanted to be, but what I was, of course, was a writer.
Being a novelist is not the sort of thing we can shut off. It infests every bit of us until we lose the boundary between Person and Writer, like one of those color charts where it is impossible to say where the blue stops and the red begins.
I'm fairly competant as a director and actor, but I am Mr. Neurotic as a writer. I just don't have enough confidence in my abilities to take criticism well. I take it personally. Start with 'It's a masterpiece,' and then tell me what you think could ...
I'm not one of those writers who insist they don't read reviews and don't care much about them. I do read them, and I do care about them, and they're not always what you want them to be in an ideal world.
I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next generation of great British writers would come from. As we talked, it became clear they had never read a word by me.
One of the surprising things I hadn't expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren't comfortable with that. I don't have a problem with that.
I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didn't have any phone service and we didn't have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed.
