I’m not a playwright.

When a man becomes a writer, I think he takes on a sacred obligation to produce beauty and enlightenment and comfort at top speed.

The only way I hear gossip is if it’s big enough and loud enough for my friends to bring it up to me. Or if it’s, like, a big untrue ordeal from my publicist – and she hates making that phone call!

I began running on an everyday basis after I became a writer. As being a writer requires sitting at a desk for hours a day, without getting some exercise you’d quickly get out of shape and gain weight, I figured.

Why, except as a means of livelihood, a man should desire to act on the stage when he has the whole world to act in, is not clear to me.

Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.

Although I write screenplays, I don’t think I’m a very good writer.

I love all of the arts. I love motion pictures. I love stage. I love theater.

My whole life is a theater piece.

My mom always wanted me to be an actor. And I started going to theater and going on auditions young.

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That’s the pitch. We’ll see.

I don’t have a vast longing for the stage.

I like a drama.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

If there’s not drama and negativity in my life, all my songs will be really wack and boring or something.

I’m a writer. I don’t support any war. That’s my principle.

I know a dramatic role is going to happen, but you just got to be patient, you know? It’s going to happen when it’s supposed to happen. I’m not rushing it. I’m not trying to make it happen tomorrow.

The drama and the trauma of the relationship you have when you’re 16 can mirror the one you have when you’re 26. Life repeats itself.

Who is more to be pitied, a writer bound and gagged by policemen or one living in perfect freedom who has nothing more to say?

Give me my robe, put on my crown; I have Immortal longings in me.

I didn’t like the play, but then I saw it under adverse conditions – the curtain was up.

I went to see ‚Phantom of the Opera‘ with my grandma and my mom when I was very little. The stage, the voice, the music… Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber has been a massive inspiration to me for some time – the storytelling, that deliciously somber undertone in his music.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I’m a writer… I write.

You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.

I don’t know what acting is, but I enjoy it.

Most of our lives aren’t that exciting, but the drama is still going on in the small details.

While we look to the dramatist to give romance to realism, we ask of the actor to give realism to romance.

I’m first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can’t say why I’m one.

Acting is nothing more or less than playing. The idea is to humanize life.

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.

I’m a writer first and a singer second.

If I had a talent, it was for looking askew at everything, possibly more than my contemporaries. But I had to really push myself to be a writer.

I need drama in my life to keep making music.

Our stories come from our lives and from the playwright’s pen, the mind of the actor, the roles we create, the artistry of life itself and the quest for peace.

I absolutely want to have a career where you make’em laugh and make’em cry. It’s all theater.

Some critics will write ‚Maya Angelou is a natural writer‘ – which is right after being a natural heart surgeon.

I do admire Judi Dench and Sir Ian McKellen, but I’m a philistine. I like the good life too much; I’m not good at going on stage night after night and on wet Wednesday afternoons.

I don’t go around thinking I’m Ray Bradbury all the time.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

I’m happy to be a writer – of prose, poetry, every kind of writing. Every person in the world who isn’t a recluse, hermit or mute uses words. I know of no other art form that we always use.

I like being a writer.

The writer must be a participant in the scene… like a film director who writes his own scripts, does his own camera work, and somehow manages to film himself in action, as the protagonist or at least the main character.

The art of acting consists in keeping people from coughing.

It was very lucky for me as a writer that I studied the physical sciences rather than English. I wrote for my own amusement. There was no kindly English professor to tell me for my own good how awful my writing really was. And there was no professor with the power to order me what to read, either.

Stand-up can take you in so many different places, man. So many doors can be opened up from stand-up comedy, and the first one that was opened up for me was acting. But you can go from acting to being a TV personality to being a radio personality to being a writer to being a producer, to just being a visionary, to voiceover work.

The writer may very well serve a movement of history as its mouthpiece, but he cannot of course create it.

Every writer has his writing technique – what he can and can’t do to describe something like war or history. I’m not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

Jack Kerouac influenced me quite a bit as a writer… in the Arab sense that the enemy of my enemy was my friend.

I don’t think of myself as an artist. I’m just a guy who can write.

It was 1996 and I was at a crossroads in my career. I had been working in Hollywood as a writer and was very unhappy. I had pitched an idea for a book some six months earlier, and the book packager, Joost Elffers, wanted me to write up a treatment for it.

The last act is bloody, however pleasant all the rest of the play is: a little earth is thrown at last upon our head, and that is the end forever.

Before I became a writer, I was running a jazz bar in the center of Tokyo, which means that I worked in filthy air all the time late into the night. I was very excited when I started making a living out of my writing, and I decided, ‚I will live in nothing but an absolutely healthy way.‘

The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.

When writing a novel a writer should create living people; people not characters. A character is a caricature.

I can’t act!

Doing a show for three weeks is nothing like doing a show for seven seasons.

And as a writer, one of the things that I’ve always been interested in doing is actually invading your comfort space. Because that’s what we’re supposed to do. Get under your skin, and make you react.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Siren voices tell me, ‚You don’t have to keep going on.‘ And then you think, ‚I’m a writer. What do I do? Sit there watching my wife clean up?‘ I don’t know. I like being a writer.

I’m a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was ‚Crime and Punishment‘. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days… I said, ‚If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.‘