A Quote by Robert B. Parker

I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being a writer without a blink.
When Nancy Reagan was newly the first lady of California, Joan Didion came and had an hour-long interview. She thought it went great, and then Joan Didion just eviscerated her in the most - possibly not inaccurate - but in the most devastating way.
Think of a book special to you, and how much bleaker and poorer your life would be if that one writer had not existed - if that one writer had not, a hundred times or a thousand, made the choice to write. You're going to be that one writer one day for somebody you may never meet. Nobody can write that book you're going to write - that book that will light up and change up a life - but you.
Being pregnant taught me how to be a better writer. It was a lesson in negative capability and surrendering to necessity. Suddenly, my body instinctually yielded to the needs of this growing being, and I had no choice but to embrace what was happening and all that lay ahead, even if I was afraid and uncertain. So, while being a parent has made writing more challenging, it has also made being a writer more certain. There's no room to procrastinate; there is to time for fear.
I had it in my head when I was in college that I wanted to be a writer, but it took me a long time to commit to being a writer. Up until then, I had worked one dead-end job after another while writing on the side.
They talk about a lot of different things, but I think they definitely have the same school of thought as my husband [Games Of Thrones creator David Benioff], which is that the difference between being a writer and not being a writer is finishing.
I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.
If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an iceberg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing.
To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it.
Joan Mitchell, Joan Baez, Judy Collins - that was my mom's era.
My first manager, Suzanne DeWalt, saw a play I was in. She was invited by the director Joan Scheckel, who was my first real acting teacher. Joan was also good friends with my friend Susie Landau Finch, who had first encouraged me to consider acting, so that's how I began studying.
A serious life, by definition, is a life one reflects on, a life one tries to make sense of and bear witness to. Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the large sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.
My writing flows out of my doctorhood. They are not separate things. They are one. I think the foremost connection between being a doctor and being a writer is the great privilege of having an intimate view of one's fellow humans, the privilege of being there and helping other people at their most vulnerable moments.
I met Jon Lovett, who was just coming off of three years of being a presidential speech writer and had just arrived here to be a comedy writer in Hollywood. I thought he was super green, in terms of this world, but he knows so much about the world that we're attempting to write about.
There are lots of similarities between being a writer and a lawyer: to tell a story to a jury, hold their attention, make them laugh, make them like you. But what makes being a barrister less satisfying than being a writer is, finally, that it's about what someone else wants you to say.
Becoming a writer wasn't a choice (there would have been far more worthwhile things to do); it was the best, most fruitful way of being a bit ill.
As every writer knows... there is something mysterious about the writer's ability, on any given day, to write. When the juices are flowing, or the writer is 'hot', an invisible wall seems to fall away, and the writer moves easily and surely from one kind of reality to another... Every writer has experienced at least moments of this strange, magical state. Reading student fiction one can spot at once where the power turns on and where it turns off, where the writer writes from 'inspiration' or deep, flowing vision, and where he had to struggle along on mere intellect.
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