Quotes on Writer

Being known as a writer did change the relationships I had with directors. The rap on actors is that they always want to inflate their parts. But when directors know you write screenplays and have a different view of things, you really get invited into the huddle in a much fuller way. And those collaborations end in friendships.

Thinking about death makes you analyse what life is. Anxiety makes you curious, and curiosity leads to understanding. I wouldn't be a writer without depression.

As a kid, I dreamt of becoming a writer. My most exciting pastime was reading novels; in fact, I would read anything I could find.

I think to be a writer, you have to enjoy being alone. I was a loner as a teenager and was always drawn to characters in books and films who were at the fringes.

Failure has been my best friend as a writer. It tests you, to see if you have what it takes to see it through.

If technique is of no interest to a writer, I doubt that the writer is an artist.

I got into the business because I love writing. When it came down to finding my voice, which every writer has to take time to do, I think I realized I write black people very well. I write us in a very honest way, and I want to hear the way we really talk.

For me as a writer, the story has always taken precedence over everything else. I have never sat down to write with broad, sweeping ideas in mind, and certainly never with a specific agenda.

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

Playwriting is the last great bastion of the individual writer. It's exciting precisely because it's where the money isn't. Money goes to safety, to consensus. It's not individualism.

I sometimes think that what I do as a writer is make a kind of colouring book, where all the lines are there, and then you put in the colour.

I think that what I have been truly searching for as a person, as a writer, as a thinker, as a daughter, is freedom. That is my mission. A sense of liberty, the liberty that comes not only from self-awareness but also from letting go of many things. Many things that weigh us down.

To some degree, we're all thinking about the same things. It's the zeitgeist. The trick, in a way, as a writer, is to hope that your interests in some sense link up with the culture around you.

I think you can be taught to write. You can't be taught to be a good writer. For that, you have to bring something to it, yourself, something that can't be given to you.