Life & Wisdom Quote by Nicholas Meyer

Meyer’s line is a quiet rebuke to the way culture loves to sort artists into neat professional bins: novelist, screenwriter, director, “franchise guy.” He’s insisting that the job title is incidental; the governing identity is narrative. The move works because it refuses the prestige hierarchy baked into creative work, where film can be treated as “commercial” and books as “serious,” or where directors get auteur halo and writers get treated like labor. Meyer collapses that ladder. Medium becomes logistics.

The phrasing is doing a lot of work. “Before I was anything else” sounds like biography, but it’s also a claim of primacy: filmmaking isn’t a detour from “real” writing; it’s the original language he thinks in. Then he pivots to “If I was always anything,” a small, defensive humility that suggests he’s been questioned, maybe even dismissed, for moving across forms. He answers by widening the frame: storyteller is the stable core; everything else is delivery system.

The context matters. Meyer’s career is a case study in cross-medium survival: novels, screenplays, and directing, most visibly inside big public machines like Star Trek and The Day After. Those projects come with heavy constraints, fan expectations, network notes, moral panics. Calling himself a storyteller is also a way to claim authorship inside collaborative, industrial art. It’s not romanticism about freedom; it’s a practical credo: follow the story wherever it can be made legible, and don’t confuse the container for the craft.