I’m not a playwright.

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

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

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?

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

I really hope someday in Hollywood, some producer or director will hire me only to do drama.

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.

The art of acting is not to act. Once you show them more, what you show them, in fact is bad acting.

I’m a writer first and a singer second. And then I started editing my own videos when I was 17, so it’s a process I’ve been doing since I was younger.

And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.

In designing the scenery and costumes for any of Shakespeare’s plays, the first thing the artist has to settle is the best date for the drama. This should be determined by the general spirit of the play more than by any actual historical references which may occur in it.

My role 14 years ago in Richard III – that was the first time I played a bad guy and learned a lot about it – they have all the fun!

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 played Othello, but I didn’t sit around thinking how Laurence Olivier did it when he played it. That wouldn’t do me any good.

I live halfway between reality and theater at all times. And I was born this way.

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

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

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

I alone of English writers have consciously set myself to make music out of what I may call the sound of sense.

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.

In utter loneliness a writer tries to explain the inexplicable.

The writer’s greed is appalling. He wants, or seems to want, everything and practically everybody, in another sense, and at the same time, he needs no one at all.

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.

Drama usually has some sort of intense conflict.

I’ve taken so many kids out of Pittsburgh and onto the great white way in New York City right into a Broadway show.

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.

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

‚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.

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.

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.

I hold that a writer who does not passionately believe in the perfectibility of man has no dedication nor any membership in literature.

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.‘

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn’t think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

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.

I don’t feel pressure in a negative way. I like pressure. I feel excitement and calm at the same time. No pressure, no diamonds. I want pressure: pressure creates drama, creates emotion.

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

Acting is happy agony.

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

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

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

But men must know, that in this theatre of man’s life it is reserved only for God and angels to be lookers on.

I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.

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

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

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

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

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.

There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.

The world is a stage, but the play is badly cast.

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!

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.

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

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

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

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.

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

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.‘

A statesman who confines himself to popular legislation – or, for the matter of that, a playwright who confines himself to popular plays – is like a blind man’s dog who goes wherever the blind man pulls him, on the ground that both of them want to go to the same place.

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.

My favorite literary heroine is Jo March. It is hard to overstate what she meant to a small, plain girl called Jo, who had a hot temper and a burning ambition to be a writer.