Wes Craven Quotes

I envisioned that as my life: staying in academia to make a living and then taking summers off to write my novels.

I started writing when I was 21. I was going to become an historian. And then I realized there was more to the world than just the past. I didn't want to spend my life in the library.

I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.

I'd wanted to be a writer and when I came back to New York worked as a musician too, but I found my writing starting to get more and more referential to cinema.

I started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.

I'd probably want to teach at university, because children would drive me insane. I suspect it would be English literature, Shakespeare and so forth. I've always been deeply, deeply in love with that kind of thing.

I instantly chucked my academic ambitions and began writing fiction full-time.

I knew I wanted to do something creative, and you don't necessarily go to Harvard to do that. It's not the best choice for creative writing.

Although I still occasionally paint and draw, my life has now been shaped by my writing.

After a sound public education, I attended Penn and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. After being drafted into the military and studying Indonesian, I emerged as a writer, not a painter.

I worked as a teacher in the public school system in New York City for several years, and I was a victim of the layoffs, you know, in the mid-'70s. And then I worked as a sales engineer for a company in New Jersey that was selling industrial filtration equipment.

During my senior year, I was supposed to spend a semester student teaching, but decided I couldn't be a teacher. My aunt Beth's friend was Jackie Gleason's daughter, Linda Miller. She encouraged me to talk to her. After doing that, she recommended Catholic University's M.F.A. acting program. So that's what I did.

When I was a child, writing was the worst possible choice of a career in my family. My father had always identified himself as a writer to my mother when they met. When they met, he was writing this great novel, there was no doubt about it.

I always wanted to be a film-maker when I was younger, not an actor. I was an eight-year-old who dreamed of being a writer on 'The Simpsons,' which was a weird dream to have. But I started taking acting classes as a way to learn how to direct actors and I sort of fell in love with it.

Sometime around 2006, I decided I had missed my true calling as a young adult author.

All I wanted to do was write - at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn't need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

I always wanted to be a writer, from being a little kid onwards. My dad and my mum both had phases when that was what they did.

I knew I wanted to be a writer at 13. Before that, I told everyone I was going to be an artist.

But we were doing plays and movies which I had nothing to do with other than being a producer, and I don't have that kind of interest or time any more.

I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40.

After I finished college, I got a job on Wall Street as a derivatives trader, but after a couple years of it, I was calling in sick in order to work on my novel.

Eventually, I decided that if I was going to really write a novel, I couldn't do it in New York City while holding down a job. You need a constant money source to live in New York City unless you're independently wealthy, which I'm not.

I went to University College London and read English literature, then realised if you were interested in story and narrative, film was the way to go.

After I'd been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.