Quotes About Author

As for action movies, I did Tarzan, and I'm also about to shoot Meltdown, which John Carpenter wrote.

If you wrote a novel in South Africa which didn't concern the central issues, it wouldn't be worth publishing.

The writer probably knows what he meant when he wrote a book, but he should immediately forget what he meant when he's written it.

Once in 1919, when I was traveling at night by train, I wrote a short story. In the town where the train stopped, I took the story to the publisher of the newspaper who published the story.

There's certain stock lines that, you know, like heckler lines, you know, like, where did you learn to whisper, a helicopter, you know? Nobody owns those. I mean, someone first wrote it but it's been so universally used that it's common and it's called stock.

I wrote on the fourth season of 'Arrested Development.'

I wrote the very first stories in science fiction which dealt with homosexuality, The World Well Lost and Affair With a Green Monkey.

I sent The World Well Lost to one editor who rejected it on sight, and then wrote a letter to every other editor in the field warning them against the story, and urging them to reject it on sight without reading it.

My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'

If I don't relate to a song, I won't sing it. The thing is that if I wrote it, I'm always going to relate to it.

I'd always liked to write, but I never wanted to be a writer, because it seemed a sissy occupation. It is. To this day, I find it terribly easy. And so, rather than trying to hunt up a text, I just wrote one.

Believe it or not, there are some things that I have written that would be kind of a dream to make. Hopefully, I will get to finance them... There is something that I wrote called 'Demon's Flare' which would kind of be a dream come true.

'Bomber' was the first song I wrote about war.

I wrote a great deal about the Civil Rights Movement when I was writing for 'The Nation' in the '60s, and also for Esquire magazine. Reading the biography of Coffin, it just reminded me that in those days, when you saw the term 'Christian,' it usually meant people for civil rights and for justice.

When I wrote 'The Rozabal Line,' I had no preconceived notions of what a commercial bestseller should be. I have always viewed 'The Rozabal Line' as my first love and probably my best work. The fact, however, is that it is my least read work.

I was a political journalist for a long time. I wrote a book about Putin. I made all kinds of trouble.

Some of the most untidy writers have also been the most productive. Iris Murdoch, for instance, wrote a good 30 books in a house strewn with rubbish.

Throughout his career, W.G. Sebald wrote poems that were strikingly similar to his prose. His tone, in both genres, was always understated but possessed of a mournful grandeur.

I wrote 'The Searcher' because I love westerns, and they've fallen out of fashion.

I don't teach literature from my perspective as 'Joyce Carol Oates.' I try to teach fiction from the perspective of each writer. If I'm teaching a story by Hemingway, my endeavor is to present the story that Hemingway wrote in its fullest realization.

I always wrote risque comedy and crude comedy.

I wrote about real people and real circumstances and real neighborhoods. There was no crypt or castles or H.P. Lovecraft-type environments. They were just about normal people who had something bizarre happening to them in the neighborhood.

When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.

When I wrote 'Silver Linings,' I thought I was writing a book about the Philadelphia Eagles and male bonding, but when the book came out, it was surprising to me that the mental health community embraced it.