Quotes About Writers

Some writers are prolific; some are shape-shifters. It's rare and intimidating to encounter one who is both.

Writers who are activists are very rarely taken seriously as artists.

I enjoyed needling the press. If I didn't enjoy it, I wouldn't have done it. Writers have rarely played, so as a coach, you have antagonistic feelings about some guy writing up the story of the game who's never even attempted to play it.

But the fact I'm even getting to play a character that the producer, director and writers want me to play is a rarity in the industry. You'd think it happens all the time. It doesn't. There are so many hoops to jump through to get cast in something.

There were four major 20th-century science fiction writers: Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Of those four, the first three were all published principally in science-fiction magazines. They were preaching to the converted.

My literary heroes all wrote about L.A.: Joseph Wambaugh, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler were the three writers that made me want to be a writer.

What brought me to the table was Raymond Chandler and, to a lesser degree, Ross Macdonald and Dashiell Hammett. I was basically inspired to want to write like the classic private-eye writers.

I picked up reading late because I grew up dyslexic. When I went to college, a friend who was a big reader got me started on a number of writers, including Hemingway.

My influence is probably more from American crime writers than any Europeans. And I hardly read any Scandinavian crime before I started writing myself. I wasn't a great crime reader to begin with.

Dialogue is the place that books are most alive and forge the most direct connection with readers. It is also where we as writers discover our characters and allow them to become real.

I really think that in the media world that we live in now, especially for writers, it has to be a conversation. With very few exceptions, it can't be this one-way, 'Here I am on the mountaintop preaching to all of you great unwashed readers in hopes of saving you.' It doesn't work that way.

Writers are essential. Readers are essential. Publishers are not.

I think publishers need to be the ones that publish the books and control that process: finding writers, helping them with their work, finding readers. I think writers need that.

In its fifty-first year of publication, 'The Paris Review' continues to search for new ways to bring together writers and readers.

It's that kind of thing that readers have. I have it as a reader myself: that expectation that the writer will be that person. Then I meet other writers and realize that they're not.

Literary interviews are inevitably packed with the nuts and bolts of how writers do their work, and there's very little that aspiring writers do more readily than fling other people's nuts and bolts into their toolboxes.

We really believe, existing in a climate where comic books and franchises are the order of the day, that new material and writers need to be fostered more than ever. And in the theater and in television, the idea of original writing holds real value.

I grew up reading genre writers, and to the degree that Eric Ambler and Graham Greene are genre writers, I'm a genre writer.

I didn't know I was cool, but I was very flattered that some of the younger comedy writers came up to talk to me at the Emmys. I found that gratifying.

Writers who do great work must be coddled and encouraged.

We have people say, 'There's not enough women writers.' I have a writers room that is almost nothing but women over at 'Grey's Anatomy.'

It seems that, culturally, young people function more in groups. They know each other through digital media. All the young comedy people who work in TV are really used to working at the table with lots of writers around. They're comfortable in the group; they don't assert their own egos over everyone else.

When I started at the 'Guardian,' though, I couldn't think of anything we saw eye to eye on, except feminism, and even this would soon be arguable as 'Guardian' writers queued up to drool over Eminem.

That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.