A Quote by John Gregory Dunne
Novels do take charge of the writer, and the writer is basically a kind of sheepdog just trying to keep things on track.
Related Quotes
I've been a writer for years, but it was mainly as a function of trying to be a director, so I just got work as a writer. I want to keep directing.
When you are what we call a 'minority writer,' a writer of color, a writer of any kind of difference, there is some kind of presumption of autobiography in everything you produce. And I find that really maddening, and I resist that.
writers of novels are so busy being solitary that they haven't time to meet one another. But then, a writer learns nothing from a writer, conversationally. If a writer has anything witty, profound or quotable to say he doesn't say it. He's no fool. He writes it.
Oh, I love labels, as long as they are numerous. I'm an American writer. I'm a Nigerian writer. I'm a Nigerian American writer. I'm an African writer. I'm a Yoruba writer. I'm an African American writer. I'm a writer who's been strongly influenced by European precedents. I'm a writer who feels very close to literary practice in India - which I go to quite often - and to writers over there.
I do realize that I am a popular writer who people buy to take on vacation. I'm an escapist kind of writer.
If you are going to be a writer, you have to have self-belief, every writer gets rejections, they say the difference between a successful and unsuccessful writer is an unsuccessful writer gives up, if you keep going you will succeed.
As an actor, you have to be able to take all sides as well. You have to at least be able to understand things. No bad guy looks in the mirror every morning and says, boy, I'm gonna be a real bad guy this morning. He goes after his own what he's after, just like us good guys. You kind of have to take a stand and, a lot of times, you have to take the writer's stand or the stand of the character this writer has created.
I tend to think that the onus is on the writer to engage the reader, that the reader should not be expected to need the writer, that the writer has to prove it. All that stuff might add up to a kind of fun in the work. I like things that are about interesting subjects, which sounds self-evident.
There's the fact that American fiction is basically the most apolitical fiction on the globe. A South American writer wouldn't dare think of writing a novel if it didn't allude to the system into which these people are orchestrated - or an Eastern European writer, or a Russian writer, or a Chinese writer. Only American writers are able to imagine that the government and the corporations - all of it - seem to have no effect whatsoever.
Every now and then, a writer emerges who just gets better and better. These are the really exciting ones to encounter. Their novels carry the promise of so much more to come. Warwick Collins is one such writer.
You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.
Becoming a writer can kind of spoil your reading because you kind of read on tracks. You're reading as someone who wants to enjoy the book but also, as a writer, noticing the techniques that the writer uses and especially the ones that make you want to turn the page to see what happened.
If a writer writes poems and short stories and novels, but nobody ever reads them, is she really a writer?
I kind of want to be seen as an American writer, not just a New York writer.
TV is a writer's medium, the writer is in charge effectively. So what you write is what gets shot, so in that sense I prefer it. But in terms of the scale of it, features are fantastic.
I always just wanted to be a writer, not necessarily a particular kind of writer.
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