Writer Tom Quotes & Sayings

I got no idea wht a writer of a book should have respect. Or even get the time of day, unless he's a prophet. It's a sign of our present-day hell. Books, think about it, the writer of a book does envy, sloth, gluttony, lust, larceny, greed or what? Oh, vanity. He don't miss a single one of them. He is a peeping Tom, an onanist, a busybody, and he's faking humility every one of God's minutes. — Barry Hannah

The novelist Dumas would one day borrow features from both of his uncles, not to mention his grandfather, the acknowledged scoundrel, in fashioning the central villains of The Count of Monte Cristo. Reading court documents detailing the sordid unraveling of Charles's sham fortune, which would have devastating effects on his daughter and her unsuspecting husband, I couldn't help thinking that one of the interesting things about Dumas's villains is that, while greedy and unprincipled themselves, they produce children who can be innocent and decent. This was something that the writer understood very well from his own family. — Tom Reiss

He could not put down a word without suspecting that it might be the wrong one and that if he held back for another day the intermediate experience would provide the right one. There was no end to that, and Moon fearfully glimpsed himself as a pure writer who after a lifetime of absolutely no output whatsoever, would prepare on his deathbed the single sentence which was the distillation of everything he had saved up, and die before he was able to utter it. — Tom Stoppard

Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, 'Certainly not.' — Tom Paulin

Philip Roth is a fabulous writer, but he pretty much stays within his own life. He's so good - I mean, practically anything I've ever read of his I've really enjoyed. He just has tremendous talent. But I think he should have given himself a break and gone deeper into the society. — Tom Wolfe

If you become a creative writer with the idea that you are going to make a whole lot of money, then maybe this isn't the best choice for you. — Tom Drury

I'm a struggling writer, I'm struggling to convince people I'm a writer. — Tom Conrad

I think everyone should pursue their dreams. Whether you want to play football, act, sing, become a writer or whatever you have burning inside you as you're growing up, you should pursue it. — Tom Hiddleston

The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer. — Tom Rachman

I think it's important to have an experienced writer or editor critique your work to get it ready to pitch an agent. — Tom Robinson

I think the writer makes a good story good or a good story bad. The writer has a great deal of responsibility. — Tom Robinson

There are some writers who sweep us along so strongly in their current of energy--Normal mailer, Tom Wolfe, Toni Morrison, William F. Buckley, Jr., Hunter Thompson, David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers--that we assume that when they go to work the words just flow. Nobody thinks of the effort they made every morning to turn on the switch. You also have to turn on the switch. Nobody is going to do it for you. — William Zinsser

The thing about being a songwriter, once you realize you are one, is that to provide ammo, you start to become an observer. ... You're constantly on the alert. That faculty gets trained in you over the years: observing people, how they react to one another, which in a way makes you weirdly distant ... It's a little of Peeping Tom, being a song-writer. — Keith Richards

I went back into the older stories and reworked them, because I became a better writer over the years and could spot flaws. I loved having another chance to make them stronger, and to bring them closer to me, made them less like a greatest hits compilation, and more like something written in the same extended burst. — Tom Barbash

Ben Karlin is a friend of mine and was a writer on 'The Daily Show.' He's just put out a book and asked a bunch of writers from various disciplines to contribute. It was called 'Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me,' and of course I agreed, and then I actually had to sit down and write it. God, writing fiction is terrifying. — Tom McCarthy

I love the incredible variety of demands directing makes on you, from the entrepreneur to the hustler to the deal-maker to the writer; to directing actors and the camera and working with music, sound, marketing and promotion. It uses so many sides of your brain. — Tom Hooper

Frank Martin is a rarity. Dexterous as a player, writer and singer, he is thoughtful and skilled in his approach and passionate in his delivery. He is a unique, first-class musical personality. — Tom Kimmel

I'm not religious. I love what Clive James said the other day. James is a brilliant writer, but he keeps on writing poems on stuff. And he said, "God doesn't have a leg to stand on." — Tom Courtenay

I definitely want to do more movies, and I'm also a writer, so I have a few screenplays that I'm working on, one of them based off my one-woman show that I used to do in New York. Two of the screenplays I've written by myself, and then I'm also working on one with my writing partner, Tom Riley, who's in London. — Eliza Coupe

I think the second, or outsider's, perspective can come as you layer a story. It's as though you've grabbed a secondary character and asked them, "What do you make of this guy?" and the hope is that the answer surprises you as the writer. — Tom Barbash

No. No, it was a lonely writer I met one stormy day in Laguna Beach. He had a poem about Thelonious Monk that he sealed in a tin can and labeled Campbell's Cream of Piano Soup. Later I hear he killed himself to avoid the draft. — Tom Robbins

My father was the editor of an agricultural magazine called 'The Southern Planter.' He didn't think of himself as a writer. He was a scientist, an agronomist, but I thought of him as a writer because I'd seen him working at his desk. I just assumed that I was going to do that, that I was going to be a writer. — Tom Wolfe

Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer-so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible. — Tom Bissell

TV writing is different than other mediums, involving the writer. — Tom Skerritt

Maybe we're all ongoing stories, defined at various stages of life, or whenever people oblige us to declare ourselves. Fiction is marvelous for studying this, allowing the writer and reader to leap decades in a sentence. No other art lets you bend time as much. — Tom Rachman

'The Ballad of Black Tom' was written, in part, during the latest round of arguments about H. P. Lovecraft's legacy as both a great writer and a prejudiced man. I grew up worshipping the guy, so this issue felt quite personal to me. — Victor LaValle

It is the devious writer indeed who writes in such a way that the critic who finds himself unresponsive to the writer's vision feels like a philistine. — Tom Bissell

Every writer, without exception, is a masochist, a sadist, a peeping Tom, an exhibitionist, a narcissist, an 'injustice collector' and a depressed person constantly haunted by fears of unproductivity. — Edmund Bergler

unearthing some of the most disturbing moments in Austrian history. He had made a sort of subspecialty of studying intellectuals persecuted in the pre-Nazi era, and we discussed his fascinating work on the assassination of Hugo Bettauer, the writer and editor whose dystopian 1923 novel, Die Stadt Ohne Juden (The City Without Jews), remains one of the most uncanny predictions of a historic catastrophe ever written. — Tom Reiss

It's fortunate that I am a writer, because that has helped me understand the properties of words. They are what have made life complex. In the battle for status in the animal kingdom, power and aggressiveness have been all-important. But among humans, once they acquired speech, all that changed. — Tom Wolfe

Being a reporter took me out of myself and that shaped me as a writer. — Tom Barbash

It is while prone that ideas come. "A writer could get more ideas for his articles or his novels in this posture than he could by sitting doggedly before his desk morning and afternoon," writes Lin Yutang in his essay "On Lying in Bed. — Tom Hodgkinson

I don't want to come over as some boringly self-deprecating person. But I don't see myself as a groundbreaking writer in the way plays are structured. — Tom Stoppard

One has the responsibility to oneself, to the writer, director and the people who put up the money, to put out the best of what one has experienced and understood about the human condition as it relates to the role one has been hired to portray. — Tom Skerritt

Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer. — Tom Clancy

A writer doesn't really have much of a function on a movie set. — Tom Stoppard

Tom said to himself that it was not such a hollow world, after all. He had discovered a great law of human action, without knowing it
namely, that in order to make a man or a boy covet a thing, it is only necessary to make the thing difficult to attain. If he had been a great and wise philosopher, like the writer of this book, he would now have comprehended that Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and that Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. And this would help him to understand why constructing artificial flowers or performing on a tread-mill is work, while rolling ten-pins or climbing Mont Blanc is only amusement. There are wealthy gentlemen in England who drive four-horse passenger-coaches twenty or thirty miles on a daily line, in the summer, because the privilege costs them considerable money; but if they were offered wages for the service, that would turn it into work and then they would resign. — Mark Twain

When people pose the question, are you "coxom", Tom Conrad? I like to pose a question back at them: Is J.K. Rowling actually a witch? Is Thomas Harris the no. 1 serial killer in the the US, did Yann Martell really spend a lifetime eating pie?
Of course, as far as I know J.K. Rowling is not a witch, but instead is a rather lovely and talented writer. As for that Thomas Harris (equally talented), I very much suspect he isn't actually a serial killer at all, or if he is, he's involved in the biggest case of double bluff ... ever! As for Yann Martell, well, as everyone with half a brain knows his book is actually concerned with a mathematical constant, so ignore the dumb pie joke. Hm :/ — Tom Conrad

Once rehearsals are done the writer really doesn't have a function on the set. If the script is stabilized, then the writer becomes a celebrity tourist visiting the set, trying not to get in the way. It's very good for the ego, to go visit a film set if you are the writer, because they give you a special chair, and tell you where you can sit to watch the monitor. They make you feel special, but at the same time, they make it perfectly plain that you are irrelevant! — Tom Stoppard

I guess I would say that most of what I've learned about storytelling derives from novels and short stories. I cannot think of a novel or story, or a novelist or story writer, who thinks in terms of three-act structure. — Tom Bissell

America is a wonderful country! I mean it! No honest writer would challenge that statement! The human comedy never runs out of material! it never lets you down! — Tom Wolfe

Rebecca uttered a low dry laugh, not facetiously, but more like a stitch coming apart at the seam. A wound opened. Her eyes were opening to a world she had denied for so long. She looked up at Frank and knew, just like in the books, hatred, real hatred is a Gollum that hides under the mountain of our hearts. It buries itself deep underground where no light can touch. And it waits. Rebecca thought of Tolkien and Bilbo and Frodo and that old grey wizard, she thought that maybe they were right. Perhaps "there are older and fouler things in the deep places of the world - in the deep places of our hearts." And as she sat on the floor with Tom Johnson's Glock aimed at her husband's head, Rebecca looked into the space where his eyes should have been. She looked at what was now only darkness and felt something on the other side, something not her husband, looking back. — Thomas S. Flowers

As a very experienced writer once told me, 'It's in the rewrites'. — Tom Skerritt

Rarely ever see or meet the writer during shooting. — Tom Skerritt

Keep at it! The one talent that's indispensable to a writer is persistence. You must write the book, else there is no book. It will not finish itself. Do not try to commit art. Just tell the damned story. — Tom Clancy

David Brinkley was an icon of modern broadcast journalism, a brilliant writer who could say in a few words what the country needed to hear during times of crisis, tragedy and triumph. — Tom Brokaw

A writer needs a life of introspection. — Tom Robbins

If you don't write with the reader in mind, you are not a writer, period. — Tom Grimes

I always lamented that I wasn't a writer during the late '60s and the early '70s, with the New Journalism and Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson and all those people. — Meghan Daum

I'm not a very creative person, you know? I'm not really an art person. I'm not a great reader or writer or artist or musician. — Tom Brady

Tom Kealey might be my favorite short story writer and this astonishing collection is long overdue. — Stephen Elliott

I wanted to work on a cable show and with a writer/director because that's a much more fulfilling and freeing experience, as an actor. — Tom Ellis

I've sort of decided that I can settle for being just the artist, arranger, writer and part-time engineer. That seems like enough to do. — Tom Scholz

One of the nice things about the world of filmmaking is that you make friends in the business. Sometimes directors feel a script needs something, but they're not sure what it is, so they show it to a friend; if the friend is a writer, he ends up kicking around with that script for a while. — Tom Stoppard

It helps to know from a very early age what you want to do. From the time I was five years old, I wanted to be a writer, even though I couldn't even read. It was mainly because I thought of my father as a writer. — Tom Wolfe

Very few people can write in a crowd. This is a very solitary occupation. I have known people more talented than me who never made it. And the primary reason was always that they couldn't stand to be alone for several hours a day. Any writer worth anything has mastered the art. The art of solitude. — Tom Robbins

Most British playwrights of my generation, as well as younger folks, apparently feel somewhat obliged to Russian literature - and not only those writing for theatres. Russian literature is part of the basic background knowledge for any writer. So there is nothing exceptional in the interest I had towards Russian literature and theatre. Frankly, I couldn't image what a culture would be like without sympathy towards Russian literature and Russia, whether we'd be talking about drama or Djagilev. — Tom Stoppard

I was, a near grown man, sat in his dank, dark and rickety digs, feverishly hovering about the glare of a computer screen like a disorientated moth, one searching for a flaming light of recognition from someone/anyone! — Tom Conrad

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel. — Tom Rachman

Fortunately, the world is full of people with information compulsion who want to tell you their stories. They want to tell you things that you don't know. They're some of the greatest allies that any writer has. — Tom Wolfe

If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were. — Tom Waits

I had literary interests my whole life. I decided at the age of five I was going to be a writer. So I had done a great deal of reading. I suppose I was more at home in Greenwich Village than, say, any of classmates from Warsaw High School. But in any case, it was an overwhelming experience for me. It took me some time to begin to assimilate it. — Tom Robbins

I didn't really want to be part of a clique or a niche. But I also was looking for my own voice, as a writer, y'know? And a world I could call my own. — Tom Waits

One of the best descriptions of the type of writer I am was given by Tom Paulin, who described himself as a 'binge' writer - like a binge drinker. I go on binges. — Seamus Heaney

The job of a fiction writer is to engage the reader and rip them from reality. — Tom M. Wiseman

I always feel freelance writers are leading a heroic life. I think that is the real writer's life. On the other hand, it's good to have another job. It gives you something to do. — Tom Paulin

Great travel writing consists of equal parts curiosity, vulnerability and vocabulary. It is not a terrain for know-it-alls or the indecisive. The best of the genre can simply be an elegant natural history essay, a nicely writ sports piece, or a well-turned profile of a bar band and its music. A well-grounded sense of place is the challenge for the writer. We observe, we calculate, we inquire, we look for a link between what we already know and what we're about to learn. The finest travel writing describes what's going on when nobody's looking. — Tom Miller

There is no motivation higher than being a good writer. — Tom Wolfe

I like to think of myself as a fiction writer who liked art enough to write about it for a while, and then went on to his fiction. — Tom Robbins

People are always saying that I must have been the class clown, with all these voices. No, I was way too shy to be the class clown; I was a class clown's writer. — Tom Kenny

I view myself as a fiction writer who just happens to write nonfiction. I think I look at the world through a fiction-writer's eyes. — Tom Bissell

I think I'm a difficult conventional writer. — Tom Stoppard

David Mamet we all know is a great screenplay writer and playwright and a great director. If you like him, you like him. If you hate him, you really hate him. He's someone who's into controversy, you know what I mean? That's David Mamet. — Tom Hardy

A great writer reveals the truth even when he or she does not wish to. — Tom Bissell

I was quite a reader before I became a writer. — Tom T. Hall

Acting is a general thing; it's not like being a primary artist like a painter or writer which stands the test of time. I don't think acting stands the test of time, but it can capture the mood of the moment, which is in itself very exciting, but it rarely lasts. — Tom Hollander