For someone who writes fiction in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious it's essential to be free.

Novelists are not equipped to make a movie in my opinion. They make their own movie when they write: they're casting they're dressing the scene they're working out where the energy of the scene is coming from and they're also relying tremendously on the creative imagination of the reader.

The face of nature and civilization in this our country is to a certain point a very sufficient literary field. But it will yield its secrets only to a really grasping imagination. To write well and worthily of American things one need even more than elsewhere to be a master.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

My parents thought it was nice to develop my imagination but they never seriously thought that anything would ever come of it. They said that I couldn't be an actress because I would be taller than all my leading men so I thought I would be a writer instead.

A writer should have the precision of a poet and the imagination of a scientist.

A poet ought not to pick nature's pocket. Let him borrow and so borrow as to repay by the very act of borrowing. Examine nature accurately but write from recollection and trust more to the imagination than the memory.

Having imagination it takes you an hour to write a paragraph that if you were unimaginative would take you only a minute.

Wherever you write is supposed to be a little bit of a refuge a place where you can get away from the world. The more closed in you are the more you're forced back on your own imagination.

Although Kurt Vonnegut may not be considered a humor writer 'Breakfast of Champions' is one of the funniest books I've ever read.

It's very hard to write humor.

But it also became the experience or was the experience of the writers who were attracted to this kind of humor. They're all men or women who come from the same kind of experience in their own lives.

Some major writers have a huge impact like Ayn Rand who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction but it really isn't fiction at all.

Feature-length film comedy is harder to pull off than the episodic sitcom - it doesn't have the same factory machinery up and running teams of writers putting familiar characters through permutations - but that doesn't explain the widening quality gap that makes movie humor look like a genetic defective.

The nation that complacently and fearfully allows its artists and writers to become suspected rather than respected is no longer regarded as a nation possessed with humor or depth.

Writing a song is much like being an author. Yes we all have tools to write (everyone has a brain I hope!) but that doesn't all of a sudden make us best selling authors.

Yes I do often write poems from the mind but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

I don't remember deciding to become a writer. You decide to become a dentist or a postman. For me writing is like being gay. You finally admit that this is who you are you come out and hope that no one runs away.

I love making movies and hope to write my own screenplay someday and do some producing and be behind-the-scenes as well.

Chemistry is not anything an executive producer or writer can orchestrate or plan you just hope for it.

Ironically Latin American countries in their instability give writers and intellectuals the hope that they are needed.

But what I hope for from a book - either one that I write or one that I read - is transparency. I want the story to shine through. I don't want to think of the writer.

I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.

Nothing you write if you hope to be good will ever come out as you first hoped.