The things the writers have me doing on 'Suburgatory' are insane. I think they think it's easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.
From his style, you’d think Jason Brannon was the dark double of Ray Bradbury. He cares more about character and realism than most writers I’ve read and his plots flow like well-orchestrated music. Indeed, Brannon’s writing has a classical feel, reminiscent of the best traditional work in the genre, even when he’s going for gut-wrenching terror and torture in-extremis.
We writers - we're the snowflakes of the literary world. We each have our own shape.
A lot of writers that I know have told me that the first book you write, you write about your childhood, whether you want to or not. It calls you back.
All writers steal from their own lives.
I encourage teachers to speak in their own voices. Don't use the gibberish of the standards writers.
An actor is somebody who communicates someone else's words and emotions to an audience. It's not me. It's what writers want me to be.
Writers want to summarize: What does this mean? What did we learn from this? That's a very 19th-century way of thinking about art, because it assumes that it should make our lives better or teach us something.
We have all this courage as writers, but then there's this fear.
I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity. Its record for being accurately predictive is really, really poor! If you look at the whole history of science fiction, what people have said is going to happen, what writers have said is going to happen, and what actually happened - it's terrible.
There was a time in the 1930s when magazine writers could actually make a good living. 'The Saturday Evening Post' and 'Collier's' both had three stories in each issue. These were usually entertaining, and people really went for them. But then television came along, and now of course, information technology. . . the new way of killing time.
Too many of these writers in the music papers, they are misunderstanding everything. The disco sound is not art or anything so serious.
Since Caesar, we know his historians are liars. The good writers get read. Bad history doesn't get read.
Here's a quick rule of thumb: Don't annoy science fiction writers. These are people who destroy entire planets before lunch. Think of what they'll do to you.
Great writers create; writers of smaller gifts copy
It's very hard to turn writers against each other, believe it or not.
Saturday night is perfect for writers because other people have "plans.
Characters are not created by writers. They pre-exist and have to be found.
One handles truths like dynamite. Literature is one vast hypocrisy, a giant deception, treachery. All writers have concealed more than they revealed.
This is what writers mean when they say that the notion of cause involves the idea of necessity. If there be any meaning which confessedly belongs to the term necessity, it is unconditionalness. That which is necessary, that which must be, means that which will be, whatever supposition we may make in regard to all other things.