Quotes About Writers

I had been on this improv team at this really great improv theater. It's called iO now. It used to be called Improv Olympic. They have showcases for Lorne Michaels and other writers and people who work at 'SNL' usually about once a year, although I don't know if it always happens.

Our task as fiction writers isn't just to report something that didn't really happen. We have to give what we write a sense of reality. The tool of our tradition is language.

We have a strong tradition in Toronto of really great film writers, and growing up in that climate is a big reason I pursued cinema studies.

There's a long relationship between science fiction and the 'novel of ideas,' and I think writers of science fiction are able to draw on that tradition to take risks, to constantly raise the level of their ambition.

I've seen enough successful writers who no longer seem to care when they are recognized with an award, and I think that's just tragic.

We were trained as writers with the idea that literature is something that can change reality, that it's not just a very sophisticated entertainment but a way to act.

I've talked to a lot of artists - painters, writers, musicians - many of whom have had great ideas on trains. The only explanation I have is all that stuff is coming at you while you're relaxed, so somehow it kicks you into hyperspace in terms of brain function.

I am, as are most writers, just hugely obsessive, and so are many of my closest friends, who tend to be writers or scientists. It's a trait of human nature that I'm particularly in touch with. So I tend to project it onto my characters.

The great thing about working in cable is that, since the season is truncated - we only do 12 shows - the writers are more at ease in terms of mapping out the trajectory of the story and the characters.

'Better Call Saul' happens in the same universe as 'Breaking Bad,' and we have the same writers and mostly the same crew. Like 'Breaking Bad,' it is a transformation story, and Bob Odenkirk brings his own distinctive flavour.

Most writers have no idea how to make a film. It's a totally different skill set. Nor is it just to translate exactly what's on the page directly on to the screen - because that would be terrible. It would be five hours long, and the structure would be a mess. But the writers know the characters and the story.

Art educates. That's why writers must know life. . .If the writer knows life, his work is often progressive, even though his own consciousness may lag behind.

The reason that war is such a fascinating subject for writers is because it's a revealer. Put a bunch of people in an adrenaline-fuelled, life-or-death situation and their fundamental behaviours are exposed, the scrim is taken away and the motivations behind each personality come out to play.

It's funny. People often compare me to other humor essayists. They're usually quite nice comparisons I will accept those gladly. But I am always sort of appalled at the idea of being lumped with other, more chick-y female writers. And the truth is probably that neither comparison is accurate.

Writers are not psychotherapists. Their job is to give readers stress, strain, and pressure.

There is a tendency among people within a profession to use or create words whose meanings are clear only to others within their narrow group and obscure to the rest of the world. This tendency in all specializations is a barrier to communication and a support of self-serving secrecy in an "in" group. Writers have an obligation to defend their language against the assaults of jargon.

Like all headstrong types, Czentovic had no sense of the ridiculous; ever since his triumph in the world tournament, he considered himself the most important man in the world, and the awareness that he had beaten all these clever, intellectual, brilliant speakers and writers on their own ground, and above all the evident fact that he made more money than they did, transformed his original lack of self-confidence into a cold pride that for the most part he did not trouble to hide.

One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was the fact that all kinds of persons acquired a familiarity with one's favourite writers. It gave one a curious feeling; it was like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one's dressing gown.

It is the nobility of their style which will make our writers of 1840 unreadable forty years from now.

Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.

One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.

To me the truth comes first and then the literature. We in China are dealing with a dictatorial system and we writers have to take a stance on it.

And the truth is that if a writer is successful, you gain readers. It benefits all the writers. It's important for all the writers that as many of us as possible be successful.

We fiction writers are a brazen lot, are we not? For we, in our passion, embrace just enough truth to consecrate our delicately contrived lies.