As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of.
‐‐ Iain Banks
As a writer you have a duty to be a messenger.
‐‐ Jay Griffiths
As a writer, you have control of the words you put on the page. But once that manuscript leaves your hand, you give control to the reader. As a director, you are limited by everything: weather, budget, and egos.
‐‐ Nicholas Meyer
As a writer, you have to be near people and hear stuff. I'm a hamburger and cheese kind of fellow; I'm not Henry David Thoreau.
‐‐ James McBride
As a writer, you have to believe you're one of the best writers in the world. To sit down every day at the typewriter filled with self-doubt is not a good idea.
‐‐ Jo Nesbo
As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.
‐‐ Joe Abercrombie
As a writer, you have to put yourself in service to the character, get behind their eyes by delineating the world where the character develops. You have to listen to the character and see him inside his certain world to know what conclusions he would draw.
‐‐ Alice McDermott
As a writer, you have to realize that people want to like the characters, so you have to be careful to keep them involved.
‐‐ Alexander McCall Smith
As a writer, you live in permanent self-doubt; you're on permanent trial.
‐‐ Antonio Munoz Molina
As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.
‐‐ Ann Brashares
As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.
‐‐ Nancy Kress
As a writer, you need a strong sense of self-belief. And when it comes to writing, I've always had that.
‐‐ Ronald Frame
As a writer, you owe it to yourself not to get stuck in a rut of looking at the world in a certain way.
‐‐ Hilary Mantel
As a writer, you're always trying to say the best thing. You're always thinking about what's the best thing to say, and what's the hardest way to say it, and what's the best line? Sometimes the best line is the simplest line. Sometimes the best line is the line that evokes more feeling than actual wordsmithing.
‐‐ Pusha T
As a writer, you're making a pact with the reader; you're saying, 'Look, I know and you know that if this book was really a murder investigation, it would be a thousand pages long and would be very dull, and you would be very unhappy with the ending.'
‐‐ Mark Billingham
As a writer, you're really in control of almost everything. That's not the case in TV. You have to be prepared to work with a lot of people to make something happen, and you got to be prepared, at least in the beginning, to not be too good at your specific task.
‐‐ Josh Elliott
As a writer, you rely on whatever makes you up as a person, whether those things are twisted and nasty or otherwise.
‐‐ Philip Kerr
As a writer, you should care about reluctant readers. You want these kids to feel like books are amazing and cool and that they're an escape.
‐‐ Paolo Bacigalupi
As a writer, you sit around a computer all day, and it's too easy to open another tab and keep Rotten Tomatoes there.
‐‐ Evan Daugherty
As a writer, you write the book, you give it to your editor, it's copy edited, it's published, it's thrown out there, and then there's a response.
‐‐ David Bergen
As a young actor, I booked a movie in the U.S. I didn't speak any English at the time, so I learned my lines phonetically when I auditioned for it.
‐‐ Demian Bichir
As a young actor, I found myself in all these movies at once, with two big trilogies and a Cameron Crowe film and working with Ridley Scott a couple of times.
‐‐ Orlando Bloom
As a young actor, I played a lot of 'exotic' parts and was stuck with the tag 'sultry.' I had to refuse such parts if I were ever to play anything else. It did the trick, but my agent feared it made me harder to cast.
‐‐ Diana Quick
As a young actor, I worked with Kevin McNally and have always thought him brilliant.
‐‐ Richard McCabe
As a young actor, I would be invited to the CBC radio drama department to do voices for different characters, and I found that I could do quite a few of them. I wasn't a visual presence, and I found it easier to construct a voice from the written page.
‐‐ Peter Cullen
As a young actor, it's important to see how the greatest in the industry work... diva behavior is never it.
‐‐ Sean Maguire
As a young actor, people were trying to define who I was before I really knew that for myself. But I still remember thinking, 'This is what I love doing, and I hope I'm going to be able to do it forever.'
‐‐ Tom Cruise
As a young, ambitious novelist, writing for kids never crossed my mind.
‐‐ Rodman Philbrick
As a young analyst just out of Stanford business school in the 1960s, I got to really understand what growth was about. Back then, you had to ask a customer to pay some money. That was the most important thing in getting a company off the ground.
‐‐ Charles Schwab
As a young athlete, it was first about having fun; then it was about winning.
‐‐ Dan O'Brien
As a young black boy, it made me proud to see black leaders that did something amazing and made the world change.
‐‐ John Legend
As a young boy growing up in rural India, most of what I knew of the world was what I could see around me. But each night, I would look at the Moon - it was impossibly far away, yet it held a special attraction because it allowed me to dream beyond my village and country, and think about the rest of the world and space.
‐‐ Naveen Jain
As a young boy, I did a lot of foolish things. I made a lot of mistakes. And you live and learn.
‐‐ Tony Bennett
As a young boy, I had strange dreams of affecting people and somehow being instrumental in changing the makeup of Africa and helping to improve life there.
‐‐ Djimon Hounsou
As a young boy, I read 'Cheaper by the Dozen' and immediately became neurotic about my use of time. It taxed me severely, but only for the next 50 years. But I think it also allowed me to discipline myself to sit in the chair and be a writer, where one of the most needed qualities is patience.
‐‐ Ridley Pearson
As a young boy, I was obsessed with endangered species and the extinct species that men killed off. Biology was the subject in school that I was incredibly passionate about.
‐‐ Leonardo DiCaprio
As a young boy, I was taught in high school that hacking was cool.
‐‐ Kevin Mitnick
As a young boy, I was very interested - as I still am - in all sorts of adventure and exploration. I thought about being an astronaut, a dinosaur scientist, or marine biologist, but I clearly was drawn to the ocean and to the water.
‐‐ Brian Skerry
As a young boy I won a few dollars in 1972 when Riva Ridge won the Kentucky Derby. I had overheard someone say he was going to win, and I guess that made an impression on me.
‐‐ Matt Gonzalez
As a young boy, scouting gave me a confidence and camaraderie that is hard to find in modern life.
‐‐ Bear Grylls
As a young child, I played the violin. I think that that started the spark.
‐‐ Peggy Fleming
As a young child, I suffered from poor health. My parents encouraged me to swim, which really improved my condition.
‐‐ Sui He
As a young child, I was never a crier. I never cried to get my way, or even when I was in pain.
‐‐ Dan O'Brien
As a young child my attention span was, as I remember it, rather short.
‐‐ Michael Morpurgo
As a young concert-going person, I was never enamoured with celebrities who would walk out to feature in certain songs and then walk off.
‐‐ John Lydon
As a young entrepreneur starting an enterprise company, be prepared for the fact that you'll need to get involved in enterprise sales. Everyone wants to speak to the founder, and this is also how you'll get feedback on your product. It's worth bringing in early somebody with enterprise sales experience.
‐‐ Anthony Goldbloom
As a young girl, I definitely struggled with knowing what to do with my hair. I was just in a neighborhood that had mostly white people, and the hair norm was long and sleek and straight. My hair naturally was curly, and I didn't have that many references.
‐‐ Jillian Hervey
As a young girl, I dreamed of having a voice in fashion.
‐‐ Ann Demeulemeester
As a young girl, I loved having stories read to me. There is something magical about narration and voiceovers. Recording a voiceover is an art form in itself.
‐‐ Michelle Phan
As a young girl, I plowed the fields of our family farm. I worked construction with my dad. To save for college, I worked the morning biscuit line at Hardees.
‐‐ Joni Ernst