I wanted to be a director and producer and writer, but in the early '40's the union wouldn't let you get through the gates. You couldn't get on a crew, or even learn to direct.

I wanted to be a director and producer and writer, but in the early '40's the union wouldn't let you get through the gates. You couldn't get on a crew, or even learn to direct.

I was doing acting work at Fox - bit pieces with Greg Peck in The Gunfighter and things like that - and grew up more or less as a Fox contract player in about two years.

Arnold Bennett was a writer I admired. He was actually taking notes at his father's deathbed.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

For a country to have a great writer is like having another government. That's why no regime has ever loved great writers, only minor ones.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.

A true critic ought to dwell upon excellencies rather than imperfections, to discover the concealed beauties of a writer, and communicate to the world such things as are worth their observation.

A writer may tell me that he thinks man will ultimately become an ostrich. I cannot properly contradict him.

The most important training, though, is to experience life as a writer, questioning everything, inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that, all the other things will come; if you don't, there's no hope for you.

It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.

Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there.

It's essential not to have an ideology, not to be a member of a political party. While the writer can have certain political views, he has to be careful not to have his hands tied.

I was never really a writer, I was always more of a performer.

Without books I would not have become a vivacious reader, and if you are not a reader you are not a writer.

Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do.

So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.

Nowadays I'm not even sure if newspapers take into account whether a person is a good writer.

Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.

You know, Mamet is not a huge writer of female parts. Most of his movies don't even have women in them, so I'm lucky I'm in it at all.

A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.

I am a writer. I could not afford to take 15 months off from my writing career to play detective.

In the theater, characters have to cut the umbilical cord from the writer and talk in their own voices.

I knew I wasn't a baseball writer. I was scared to death. I really was afraid to talk to players, and I didn't want to go into the press box because I thought I was faking it.

A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.

The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.

I think if I had been writing fiction, where the work is entirely dependent on the writer's creativity and the potential directions the narrative might take are infinite, I might have frozen.

The writer who can't do his job looks to his editor to do it for him, though he won't dream of sharing his royalties with that editor.

The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.

Peter Lucas and I live in Durham but spend a great of time in North Wales, where we have a cottage in the mountains, and in Vermont, USA, with my sister - who is a children's writer married to a poet.

Oh, well, in Los Angeles everybody is an actor, or a producer, or a writer, or a director, or an agent, or... So everybody understands the hours.

Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!

But I work harder now because I have so much more exposure. And actually the harder you work as a writer, the better you get at it. It's like anything else. It's a muscle you have to exercise. I write more now than ever.

The writer's duty is to keep on writing.

I suspect that writer's block afflicts mainly people who have some stable and ample source of income outside of writing. So far it hasn't been a problem.

The writer I feel the most affinity with - you said you felt my books are 19th century novels, I think they're 18th century novels - is Fielding, Henry Fielding, he's the guy who does it for me.

I always wanted to be some kind of writer or newspaper reporter. But after college... I did other things.

I don't think that the writer is regarded as a freak by Americans.

The travel writer seeks the world we have lost - the lost valleys of the imagination.

Life can't defeat a writer who is in love with writing, for life itself is a writer's lover until death.

The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.

Sean's a great, great writer.

If I've done my work well, I vanish completely from the scene. I believe it is invasive of the work when you know too much about the writer.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

The talent of a true writer and poet is in the ear.

You want to be a writer, don't know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.