Writer's Autonomy Quotes

Creative writers are always greater than the causes that they represent.

The idea you can tell a writer of a specific religion to stop writing about that religion is presumptuous.

Don't classify me, read me. I'm a writer, not a genre.

I just write what I want to write.

There are some serious limitations in Mo Yan's situation as a writer in China today - just as there are for Jia Zhangke, one of the world's greatest film directors. He can only phrase his dissent obliquely, in his art. Writers in "free" societies labor under no such constraints. They can write more or less whatever they want in both their fiction and their commentary. Yet so many of them look oddly inhibited, even timid, and depressingly a couple of prominent figures actually positioned themselves to the right of their governments, intelligence agencies, and corporations.

It's probably unprecedented for a filmmaker simply to take the writers' script and treat it as the instructions on the package. What really happens is you pretty much suppress your own instincts - and your own views on the matter - and write things the way filmmakers would like to have them, though the filmmakers often don't know what they want. They can only find out by reading what you do.

As a writer no one's gonna tell me how to write, I'm gonna write the way I wanna write!

I think it would be a shame for any writer to let their publishers in any way corral them into a single genre.

As a writer, I must be free to say what is in all the diversity I can command. I regret the distorting prejudices that surround me, whether they affect homosexuals or men or the physically handicapped and I can't alone defeat them. They will not defeat me, either as a lesbian or a writer.

You can't always win arguments as a writer, but you have to just go ahead and say, well, I'm doing it that way anyway.

As a linguist, I see the arbitrariness of strictures editors force on me as a writer.

You can't write something to please someone.

The one thing a writer has to have is a pencil and some paper. That's enough, so long as she knows that she and she alone is in charge of that pencil, and responsible, she and she alone, for what it writes on that paper.

I don't understand why one should be one thing or the other. Writing, to me, is writing is writing. It should be a flexible tool. Whatever skills I have, have to work for me; I won't be dictated by them.

I'm a writer, and I will write what I want to write.

As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.

I am free to write the worst junk in the world.

Your writing is still yours, no matter what the contract or your editor might say. Trust your gut. It knows when you're screwing up. Your brain will lie to you. It loves the paycheck, it loves positive feedback. Your gut is under no obligation to make you feel good.

With network shows, writers can be so protective of every syllable.

Pretty much, the writer's in charge in theater. Of course you're in charge with the director, but no one can change your words. People can give you notes, but you don't have to take them. In Hollywood you take them and you cash your check and that's your job. It's very different.

They can't yank a novelist like they can a pitcher. A novelist has to go the full nine, even if it kills him.

I don't write to a genre.

I'd always rather stand or fall on my own mistakes. There's nothing worse than looking back, in a published book, at a line edit or a copy edit that you felt queasy about and didn't want to take, but took anyway.

Your first duty as a writer is to write to please yourself. And you have no duty towards anyone else.

The problem with being a writer/director: unless you're really disciplined, you start adding projects, and you have to make time to make them. Because you have to write them... no one else is writing them for me.