It had more layers than an onion. These writers meant business. There was a level for everybody. Your major could be celestial mechanics, and there'd be celestial-mechanics jokes.
Writers and travelers are mesmerized alike by knowing of their destinations.
I think young writers should get other degrees first, social sciences, arts degrees or even business degrees. What you learn is research skills, a necessity because a lot of writing is about trying to find information.
All writers of the Chaldaean period associate monotheism in the closest way with unity of worship.
It's also that comedians don't have the kind of narcissism that actors have. They're writers who perform their own material. It's more interesting. And they're sexy because they risk more. Stand-up comedians risk more than anyone.
It's all about who's where on the food chain. When I'm the story editor, I expect my writers to follow my vision. When I'm working for another editor, I'm obliged to follow their vision.
Unfortunately, there are writers whose only concern is how good they could make themselves look on a title.
Why would they have gone to the trouble to hire the best comedy writers in the business to write funny material for us to play straight, if the children in our audience were the only audience.
The world may be full of fourth-rate writers but it's also full of fourth-rate readers.
During my life I have seen, known, and lost too much to be the prey of vain dread; and, as for the hope of immortality, I am as weary of that as I am of gods and kings. For my own sake only I write this; and herein I differ from all other writers, past and to come.
Writing headlines is a specialty - there are outstanding writers who will tell you they couldn't write a headline to save their lives.
Writers' bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor's early wake-up call.
I often think I can see it in myself and in other young writers, this desperate desire to please coupled with a kind of hostility to the reader.
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.