I’m a singer, a writer and an actress – when I find something that I feel good enough about doing.

I get nervous when I don’t get nervous. If I’m nervous I know I’m going to have a good show.

I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity, and that includes all kinds of parts.

Becoming a writer is not a ‚career decision‘ like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don’t choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you’re not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.

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

For a true writer, each book should be a new beginning where he tries again for something that is beyond attainment. He should always try for something that has never been done or that others have tried and failed. Then sometimes, with great luck, he will succeed.

I became an actress because my mom wanted me to become an actress. It took me until my mid-30s to realize I actually didn’t. I actually wanted to write and direct and be more involved in politics and humanitarian issues.

I’m a writer, not a professional runner. It’s fun and it helps me write. I need powerful concentration.

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

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.

As a writer, as a creator, I’m giving you my experiences. But just take what I give you. You ain’t got to pry beyond that.

I’ve been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

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.

I love Chris Brown. He’s a superstar. He’s one of the best singers out there.

You know, as a writer, I’m more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.

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.

‚Lives‘ is one of those books I should really have written when I was younger. It is the classic childhood, adolescence, breakthrough-into-maturity book. Every beginning writer has that material – and after that, you’re not sure what you can do.

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.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a writer who’s writing books, and therefore, I don’t want to die. You’d miss the end of the book wouldn’t you? You can’t die with an unfinished book.

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.

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?

Faith Hill is a big role model.

I’m not a playwright.

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

If you wish to be a writer, write.

I’m no hillbilly singer.

A good writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

Meryl Streep is exactly as awesome as you would imagine Meryl Streep to be.

Very rarely do I talk off the top of my head on stage. I’m not an improv guy. I’m a writer-guy who presents what he’s written.

We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.

I’d love to do a musical. I’ve been known to have a good step or two. I’m half Samoan, you know, and part of our culture is singing and dancing daily.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

Diana Ross is a big inspiration to all of us. We all grew up watching everything about her – her mike placement, her grace, her style and her class.

I am not a consecutive writer.

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

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

In college, I think I probably positioned myself as an aspiring writer, meaning I dressed sort of extravagantly and adopted all the semi-Byronic affectations, as if I were writing, although I wasn’t actually doing any writing.

I prefer musicals, because I am the best dancer who ever lived. The best plies, the best sashays, and by far the best-smelling Capezios.

You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.

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.

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

All the time, I’ve felt that life is a wager and that I probably was getting more out of leading a bohemian existence as a writer than I would have if I didn’t.

I’m always happy to blow up any misconceptions that people have about stage school cos everyone thinks it’s really nasty there but it’s not.

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.

Read with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.

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

The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.

When I started making my own records, I had this idea of drowning out the singer and putting the rest in the foreground. It was the background that interested me.

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

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.

I never really felt like a rock singer or a rock star or whatever.

If you appear in the ‚Atlantic‘ or ‚Harper’s‘ or the ‚New Yorker,‘ by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.

The day when I am no more than a writer I shall cease to be a writer.

An actress is not a machine, but they treat you like a machine. A money machine.

Sometimes I wonder why I’m a novelist right now. There is no definite career reason why I became a writer. Something happened, and I became a writer. And now I’m a successful writer.

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

In Hollywood, they think they know it all. You, as a writer, are essentially an outsider. Novelists and short-story writers, especially.

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

Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of his life, every quality of his mind is written large in his works.