Quotes About Craft

I really think that as good of a job as you do as a writer, you're absolutely indebted to the actors that have to deliver that material.

It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.

In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.

Being a professional writer is not an easy way to make a living.

As an actor, I give 60 days to act in a film, but the writer takes nearly two to three years to create a story.

Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.

Most comic scriptwriters are very bad. The artists are good, but the writers are so bad.

Writers are born, not made. We can hone the craft. We need to try to encourage someone and make a dialogue, suggesting ways to do something differently or how to improve.

Stand-up is hard. Or to keep it at a certain level is hard: I have no writers but me.

Writers are in control of editing processes - making a sentence better, cutting out a paragraph. But the initial outpouring has very little to do with conscious control or manipulation.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

To practice - write each and every day if possible - then try to attend professional writer's conferences where you can learn your craft, get to know fellow writers, and meet editors and agents.

We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.

I admire writers such as Elmore Leonard who can nail a character in three or four lines of dialogue, so he doesn't need pages of back story or clumsy exposition.

It's not a problem to be surrounded by other writers if that's the craft that you're doing. I suppose if you get obsessed with the notion of being a writer more than the writing itself, that would be bad. But I live near really smart, thoughtful people who take writing very seriously, and I can meet them for breakfast and talk books.

Writers are good at plucking out what they need here and there.

It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.

It's well known that actors are lousy writers.

Writers let themselves be enticed by the language.

I think writers are very anxious.

There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

Most writers can write, most rock 'n rollers cannot.