Quotes About Writer

The book I always say that influenced me, subconsciously, because at the time I didn't know I wanted to be a writer, was William Goldman's 'Marathon Man.' That was the first adult thriller that I loved. I read it when I was 15 or so, when my father gave it to me.

That's why Tennessee Williams was a great writer. Poetically, dramatically, it was fantastic stuff. And with the landscape, the losers in life populating it. His short stories have got rhythm, something musical about them.

Wamiqa means the goddess of wind; my dad is a poet and writer in Punjabi and Gabbi is his pseudonym.

A writer is an eternal outsider, his nose pressed against whatever window on the other side of which he sees his material.

When one is the type of writer who cares about the meaning of the historically specific setting, the history itself is not something that I would call backdrop. It's not window dressing for a timeless relationship about love and betrayal. For me, the setting and the specific history are active co-agents with me in trying to form the novel.

I was rather a poor student, too easily distracted - did a lot of gazing out of windows, fine for training to be a writer, but not a great way to achieve in the classroom. The truth is that I was happy to bumble along and do enough to avoid detention, but not much more.

I had a little epiphany when I was a writer at 'Chicago' magazine. I sat down to dinner at the Ritz-Carlton. Somebody poured a white dessert wine with chocolate cake. It was a wine I would never have expected to make sense. The idea of any wine tasting fabulous with chocolate cake was fascinating to me.

So I think that in the beginning of your career you're just looking to work. Luckily for me, my first movie was 'Rabbit Hole' and I got to work with incredible people, a Pulitzer prize winning writer, John Cameron Mitchell, and all the actors involved. So it's tough, man, because you want to have credibility.

I am a writer of the textbooks of scientology.

One of the awesome things about being a writer is that I can research nearly anything - tea? Bubblegum? Ants? Neurology? Chocolate? Textile production? It doesn't matter. It's all productive work.

The only books I give up on are texts where the writer's attention is concentrated so heavily on narrative questions that his or her use of language becomes careless.

I learned so much by being an actor, and part of my sort-of development as a writer is big thanks to the scripts I read in my acting life.

I feel like as a writer, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to 'Game of Thrones', because it really blew open the doors for fantasy on television.

I think the best thing I ever did was, years before I got the 'Late Night' show, when I first got out to Los Angeles to be a television writer, the first thing I did was I signed up to take improvisational classes... And I studied that for years, and I really loved it.

In many ways, a degree in the history of ideas is the ideal training for an aspiring writer.

I know I am a writer; it is the only thing I am sure of.

The only thing I know anything about are my own fantasies and anxieties. I don't trust my eyes. I consider myself to be a short-story writer.

In the family, writing wasn't anything anyone understood - being a writer in the real world? How could it be? We didn't have those mirrors.

I can't be interesting, controversial, and the writer I'd like to be if I need everybody to like me and think I'm doing the right thing, because those two things, in my experience, never go hand in hand.

I think that the difference between 'The Sopranos' and the shows that came before it was that it was really personal. There had been a lot of dramas, a lot of really good ones, a lot of really bad ones, but they were always franchise shows about cops, or doctors, or lawyers. They weren't about the writer himself.

A prose writer never sees a reader walk out of a book; for a playwright, it's another matter. An audience is an invaluable education. In my experience, theatre artists don't know what they've made until they've made it.

In theatre, there's the director, the writer, and below them the actor. In film, it's the actors who are most important. That goes against the grain for me.

The thematic, psychological, and cultural concerns of a writer are more relevant than whatever literary mode he or she chooses to deal with in any given novel.

Every writer follows a theme, and mine is survival. If you can't figure out what a writer's theme is, look at the books you are attracted to.