As a writer, I feel like your favorite character shouldn't be safe.
‐‐ Cullen Bunn
As a writer, I find it very satisfying when a lyric suddenly ties together more neatly than you expected it to. But for the listener, hearing a good lyric is not generally as exciting as hearing a great beat or a great riff or a great melody or even a distinctive singing voice for the first time.
‐‐ Adam Schlesinger
As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.
‐‐ J. C. Chandor
As a writer, I have learned that each time I pick up my pencil I betray someone.
‐‐ Terry Tempest Williams
As a writer, I have readers who will have a range of political views. I don't think they look to me for political guidance.
‐‐ Alexander McCall Smith
As a writer, I have this compulsion to take characters who appear formidable and bombard them with adversity until they crumble. What's interesting is watching them rise again, and seeing how they've changed and grown, if indeed they have.
‐‐ Jean Hanff Korelitz
As a writer, I have to admit, there is something darkly compelling about Alzheimer's because it attacks the two things most central to a writer's craft - language and memory, which together make up an individual's identity. Alzheimer's makes a new character out of a familiar person.
‐‐ Charlie Pierce
As a writer, I have to go to a different place now. As a person... I want to step off whatever this stage is that I have been given. The argument has been made, the battle remains to be fought - and that requires a different set of skills.
‐‐ Arundhati Roy
As a writer, I have to show complexities. Through my writings, I hope to bring out people in different situations and not just one-dimensional beings.
‐‐ Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni
As a writer, I live in the world of literature and ideas, but I entered that world as an emigre from a medieval fiefdom, the sports world of Michigan.
‐‐ Max Apple
As a writer, I'm always aware of the fact that there are so many books out there.
‐‐ David Bergen
As a writer, I'm convinced that encouraging children to write fiction, to hook into that marvelous machine called the imagination, has to be good for everyone.
‐‐ Rodman Philbrick
As a writer, I'm driven by settings. Others are driven by characters or predicaments, but with me, settings come first.
‐‐ Jim Lynch
As a writer, I'm limitless.
‐‐ Kelly Masterson
As a writer, I'm more interested in what people tell themselves happened rather than what actually happened.
‐‐ Kazuo Ishiguro
As a writer, I tend to be drawn to marginal people - writers, poet-prophets, seers, eccentrics - who embody the deeper ambivalences of their societies and bear deeper witness to their world than the famous figures we are used to celebrating, or demonizing, in our histories.
‐‐ Pankaj Mishra
As a writer, I try to appeal to the 'elusive boy audience' the same way I try to appeal to everyone: I do the very best I can to create interesting characters, addictive plots, tons of conflict, believable settings, unexpected plot twists, intriguing beginnings, and satisfying endings.
‐‐ Marie Lu
As a writer, I try to do different things, but I'm not going to become a darker artist or turn into Radiohead overnight. I don't think that's my style.
‐‐ Eliza Doolittle
As a writer, I've always been interested in others.
‐‐ Antonio Tabucchi
As a writer, I've always been somebody who's been productive and hustled hard.
‐‐ Adam Mansbach
As a writer I've learned certain lessons. One of them is to be careful about how you put a view, and to bear in mind how easily and readily you'll be misinterpreted.
‐‐ Alexander McCall Smith
As a writer, I've tried to avoid strong opinions about morality. You just want to present things as they are and let the viewer come to their own conclusion.
‐‐ Terence Winter
As a writer, I wouldn't know how to not take things out of my life.
‐‐ Zoe Cassavetes
As a writer, it is always fun to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes.
‐‐ Darren Star
As a writer, it is my job to tell a story. I don't want to get involved in social commentary; I just want to show issues from a different point of view. I want to show issues from a perspective that may not be highlighted.
‐‐ Nicola Monaghan
As a writer, it's a great narrative tool to have that character who is slightly detached but at the same time observant of his reality, because I think that's pretty much what being a writer is - being there, watching and internalizing.
‐‐ Dinaw Mengestu
As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them distributed widely enough to find their audience.
‐‐ Sylvia Day
As a writer, it's fun to create. And once you get into a long-running show with very established characters and a very established tone and format, after a while it's a really great job, but that's what it is - a job.
‐‐ Alan Ball
As a writer, it's important to stay true to your story without giving a hoot about publishers, critics and readers. You should do your karma as an author the way you want to, and rest is up to God.
‐‐ Amish Tripathi
As a writer, it's very difficult to just hand your script over to someone else, especially if you have to watch them hurt it, and that's when I decided I would direct my own work.
‐‐ Mike Binder
As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.
‐‐ Julianna Baggott
As a writer, my only responsibility is to tell a compelling story.
‐‐ Jay Asher
As a writer myself, my job has very often been to also write on the job. So you get the script and a vague idea of how the scene might work, and you then add funny words or change the script. I'm not the world's best writer or the world's best actor, but I can do that thing where I can fix - or ruin - fix-slash-ruin, add quirk, add value.
‐‐ Sally Phillips
As a writer no one's gonna tell me how to write, I'm gonna write the way I wanna write!
‐‐ Jacqueline Susann
As a writer of both novels and screenplays, I can say that screenwriting is a vastly rewarding creative life - if you fight hard enough to do it on your own terms. Whether I write books or not, my screenwriting life has been creatively rewarding and remains so.
‐‐ John Fusco
As a writer of colour, you have to be victim or perpetrator.
‐‐ Marlon James
As a writer of fiction, I spend my days inventing real lives for make-believe people; what I create can only seem real.
‐‐ Julia Glass
As a writer of fiction, lying is the central thing to all books.
‐‐ Jesse Ball
As a writer of historical fiction, I believe you don't want to fictionalize gratuitously; you want the fictional aspects to prod and pressure the history into new and exciting reactions.
‐‐ Matthew Pearl
As a writer, one is always a little blind to what one writes.
‐‐ Patrick Modiano
As a writer, one is busy with archaeology.
‐‐ Michael Ondaatje
As a writer, one is obliged to release her words, to let them live in the world on their own.
‐‐ Taiye Selasi
As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.
‐‐ Salman Rushdie
As a writer, or as a filmmaker, you have to present yourself, and part of what yourself is is what you're interested in, or what you think is funny, or what you think is sad, or what you think is horrible.
‐‐ Charlie Kaufman
As a writer, putting words on the page is how I pay attention.
‐‐ Jonathan Safran Foer
As a writer, that moment every few years when I buy a new laptop and find out that all the word processing stuff has slightly changed again (stuff I spend every working day using) is like getting into bed at night and finding some mad robot where you expected your wife to be.
‐‐ John Niven
As a writer, the worst thing you can do is work in an environment of fear of rejection.
‐‐ Carol Leifer
As a writer, there are times when you have something to say, and yet no particular 'hook' upon which to hang the missive you are burning to release.
‐‐ Tim Wise
As a writer, you aren't anybody until you become somebody.
‐‐ James Salter
As a writer, you can't allow yourself the luxury of being discouraged and giving up when you are rejected, either by agents or publishers. You absolutely must plow forward.
‐‐ Augusten Burroughs