Quotes About Writer

What Bradbury had that most other science-fiction writers didn't have at that time was a love for beautiful language, evocative description, and haunting phrases that would stick with the reader.

I'm a fantasy writer, called a fantasy writer. But there's very little, apart from one or two basic concepts in 'I Shall Wear Midnight,' which are in fact fantasy. You have sticks that fly, but they're practical broomsticks, with a bloody great strap that you can hold on to so you don't fall off. And you try not to use them too often.

I'm very drawn to Eastern Europe, so I like a Hungarian writer who wrote in French called Emil Cioran; he was always good for giving me such a stir.

When it is perceived that a show has gone awry, the pressure is staggering, and as a writer caught in that storm, it feels like you are being attacked by jackals.

I'm still not sure I want to be a writer. I think of myself as a storyteller more.

I think we get too hung up on categories. Obviously, the book market has to categorise things, and it makes it easier for a reader to go into a bookshop and choose, but as a writer, it helps to get rid of all of that and imagine you are a storyteller around a campfire.

For me, movies and television are interesting because they are the dominant storytelling form of our time. My first love will always be fiction, and especially novels, but I'm a writer... I write poetry and essays and criticism and I'd love to write a whole play, and sometimes I even write scripts.

I wanted to use what I was, to be what I was born to be - not to have a 'career', but to be that straightforward obvious unmistakable animal, a writer.

Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.

I don't know any writer of fiction who enjoys trying to point out or dissect whatever they produced with strangers and let them go through it and pick apart what's real and what isn't.

One of the greatest Soviet writers was Vasily Grossman. He was born in 1905 in Berdychiv, then one of the main centers of Jewish life in Ukraine, and died in Moscow in 1964. Grossman is rightly best known for Life and Fate, his extraordinary novel of Stalingrad. Far less well known is Everything Flows, a book on which he was still working when he died.

In general, though, one should never forget the role money plays in shaping the writer's life, and the life inevitably informs the work. My own position is that I always want to convince a publisher to give me adequate money for what I want to do. At the same time, what I want to do is to arrive at full expression in a way that seduces, that pleases people in a way they didn't expect to be pleased, or even want to be pleased.

Oddly, in a sense, I still have more confidence as a director than my ability as a writer. Somehow, directing is just really easy. It's just about being really honest about how you feel about what you're seeing.

My guitarist husband, Mike, and writer me are the old-fashioned kind of bohemians. Not 'fro-haired hipsters gyrating in iPod ads, but the sort who, starting January 1 of every year, literally don't know where their next dime is coming from.

I'm a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.

I think one of the things that attracted me about theater and the stage was the ability to escape reality. And that is what I do in my work as a writer, but in a different way. And the freedom to put your own existence on ice and become another person.

One of the things you want as a successful writer is the anonymity.

You have to be very flexible and understand as a director, especially as a writer/director, that you cannot hang onto stuff really hard. You have to be ready to accept those happy accidents and to anticipate that they are going to happen and capitalize on them.

I think, in general, as a writer, you can't really hide your values. They're always going to fall out onto the page, and I tend to trust that I don't have to force my ideals into the expression of what's going to happen naturally.

We call ourselves comedy writer-performers, and that encompasses everything, and I certainly have a very open mind about it.

People assume because you're a comedian that you want to be an actor or that you want to be a writer too. It is a very cool kind of open-ended place to enter because I don't know if I ever really imagined myself working in a writers room or acting in that capacity.

Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

INTERVIEWER Have you ever been envious of another writer? WODEHOUSE No, never. I'm really such a voracious reader that I'm only too grateful to get some stuff I can read.

If you could have a famous writer, dead or alive, write an obituary for you and really puff you up to have been something you weren't, perhaps, or otherwise take liberties with your memory, what writer would you choose?