Quotes About Writers

I think speculative fiction has fewer unspoken prerequisites than literary fiction for writers of color.

It's unusual when you get scripts not wanting to change things - I'm one of those actors who writers must hate as I'm always wanting to rewrite or swap bits about.

There's that unwritten schism that literary writers get all the awards and commericals writers get all the success.

Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional.

What's the best way to ensure a supply of good books in the future? Support up-and-coming writers now.

Way before musicians and actors cornered the market on misbehavior, writers were flooding hotel rooms and testing their livers' upper limits.

We are used to female writers who use their private lives as unmitigated material being somewhat hormonal; this somehow 'excuses' what might be seen as a highly unfeminine ability to turn their personal upsets into money.

Ask a writer what he thinks about critics and the answer you get is similar to what you get when you ask a lamppost how he feels about dogs.

I always try to stick to the script because I want to respect the writers, and I want to respect the director. But if the director and my fellow actors are okay with me playing with it a little bit, then I definitely want to play with it.

Frankly, as much as I love to improvise, it hasn't been difficult to stick to the script on 'Mad Men.' The writing is so precise, and the story so carefully crafted, that I don't think there's room - or need - for ad libbing. I could never come up with dialogue as lovely as these writers do, anyway.

I personally read criticism - at least by writers I enjoy - to stimulate a conversation in my own mind, and I like to think that's the function I serve for others.

Librarians have always stood up for writers and readers in every kind of community across this country.

Some of the writers definitely got inspired by some of the story lines, but we are evolving in the 'Daredevil' story. So when it comes to 'Elektra', they didn't follow one of her specific story lines, you know. They really tried to capture what comes through the comics, but there's not one specific storyline.

Writers are storytellers. So are readers.

My favourite writers are always great storytellers, like Bruce Springsteen; I adore Bruce Springsteen. I feel like he doesn't beat around the bush, and he doesn't overcomplicate things. He puts things into layman's terms and tells stories that anyone can understand.

All good communal storytelling comes from the sagas and arguments within the writers room.

I think there is a real thing going on where writers are feeling more liberated to write with a big canvas because of a demonstrable, continued appetite for long-form storytelling.

My education - my Ph.D. in storytelling - comes from having worked on it, being a lover of film and watching them, from working with some great writers and some very good TV directors and then working with some who weren't.

Relationships between writers and publishers are of course very strange and change all the time, rather like a see-saw.

Some of the writers I've praised are Sara Paretsky, Val McDermid, Elisabeth George and Minette Walters. Strangely enough, almost all are women.

people want to establish a canon, because people want to imagine that there are great writers and lesser writers and they want the mythology, they want the narrative for themselves. And it's embarrassing.

The fact is that television, even before the movies, offered the chance to control our work and to get to do it again when we did something right. So television has always been better to writers than any other medium for a long time.

Oh my God, I'm so excited. I love Comic-Con, it feels like a weird nerd camp. All my nerd friends are there and all the comic book writers I know and then a lot of actors, too, and you hang out with these people for just a few days, but you hang out with them all day, every day. It's like camp - it's like a weird camp. I love it.

The first time I met Harlan Ellison, we were both unpublished young punks in Cleveland, Ohio.