I’m a writer, so I like nuances.
I’m open to reading almost anything – fiction, nonfiction – as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.
The fact remains that I am a very artless and incompetent writer.
I’m basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
I’ve learned to accept that I’m a children’s writer, even if it’s not what I set out to become. It’s what I should have been all along, and I’ll stay in this role as long as I’m a writer.
When I got recognized as a writer, when I got the Emmy, I was more excited than the Emmys I had gotten as an actor.
I’m a writer of fiction. I try to write about my time, but it’s dangerous if I’m seen as an investigative writer. I manipulate and change and control.
I think a lot of writers spend years just getting up the courage to write because it seems like such a fantasy of a profession. My dad saved me all that time by making me think, ‘Oh, anyone can be a writer. It’s like being a firefighter or a lawyer.’
I don’t mind expressing my opinions and speaking out against injustice. I would be doing this even if I wasn’t a writer. I grew up in a household that believed in social justice. I have always understood myself as having an obligation to stand on the side of the silenced, the oppressed, and the mistreated.
I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn.
You need a certain amount of nerve to be a writer.
My identity is based around being a writer. I can’t not write. It’s a compulsion.
When you translate poetry in particular, you’re obliged to look at how the writer with whom you’re working puts together words, sentences, phrases, the triple tension between the line of verse, the syntax and the sentence.
What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.
Reading a newspaper is like reading someone’s letters, as opposed to a biography or a history. The writer really does not know what will happen. A novelist needs to feel what that is like.
For a writer only one form of patriotism exists: his attitude toward language.
I’d like to take a course in writing. I’m not the best writer in the world. I’d like to write more neatly, even though people don’t send many handwritten letters these days.
Salman Rushdie, indeed any writer who abuses the prophet or indeed any prophet under Islamic law, the sentence for that is actually death.
Ultimately, I don’t think you can be a character who’s completely alien or divorced from your own personality. It’s probably true of every writer – it’s probably true of every filmmaker, every songwriter – that, ultimately, every character you create is a facet of yourself.
My mom worked as a pharmacist, but she is one of the best storytellers I know. My sister is a gospel and opera singer and my brother, who passed away, was a writer.
