I think Jesse Eisenberg is such a great writer. He was a great director and really tough.
A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set.
Some writers just write about their own lives. Well, I don't want to do that. I want to have a really boring life. A quiet, boring life so no one wants to write a biography. I'm the only writer in history only to have one wife, for instance.
If art is not to be life-enhancing, what is it to be? Half the world is feminine--why is there resentment at a female-oriented art? Nobody asks The Tale of Genji to be masculine! Women certainly learn a lot from books oriented toward a masculine world. Why is not the reverse also true? Or are men really so afraid of women's creativity (because they are not themselves at the center of creation, cannot bear children) that a woman writer of genius evokes murderous rage, must be brushed aside with a sneer as 'irrelevant'?
I can't tell you any more than any other writer can tell you why they write, and I don't know what my influences are.
You're a reader as well as a writer, so write what you'd want to read.
I think it was W. H. Auden who said he was lucky that his first favorite poet was Thomas Hardy, who was a good but not a great poet, because if you are exposed to the greats too soon it can just squash you as a writer.
I've always suffered from being labelled a horror writer - just because I didn't go to university, just because I still talk in my natural voice, just because I'm not as articulate as Martin Amis.
The beauty of my work is that my sets cost nothing. That's what I love about being a writer of novels.
I am, in some sense, a writer. Even though I kinda downplay the word thing, I do enjoy writing sometimes.
I'd wanted to be a writer my whole life. But when I finally made it, I felt like a greyhound catching the mechanical rabbit she'd been chasing for so long--discovering it was merely metal, wrapped in cloth. It wasn't alive; it had no spirit. It was fake.
A good creative-writing teacher can save a good writer a lot of time.
I'm not the fastest writer. I can't just crank out ideas that are good enough.
What the writer needs is an empty day ahead.
To be a writer does not mean to preach a truth, it means to discover a truth.
Any writer who pretends to a disaffection for recognition, I think they're being duplicitous.
Why did I become a writer? A bird's feather on my windowpane in winter and all at once there arose in my heart a battle of embers never to subside again.
As for the multiple editions, in the case of a truly great writer - Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, Proust, someone with a canon - there is often a "variorum" edition of the work that presents its variants. I think publishing most other writing that way would be impossible, economically, for publishers, and very ill-advised for authors.
Well, I write in exile because I cannot return to my country, so I have no choice but to see myself as an exiled writer.
It is perfectly possible to be a professional director or a professional writer and not to be an artist: merely a sort of executor of other people's ideas.