I think the most dangerous influence for a young writer is to be treated with cynicism or discouragement.
The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.
It’s always easiest for me as a writer if I know I have a great ending. It can make everything else work. If you don’t have a good ending, it’s the hardest things in the world to come up with one. I always loved the ending of ‘The Kite Runner,’ and the scenes that are most faithful to the book are the last few scenes.
We like to think about how smart we are. But I think talent as a writer is hard-wired in, it’s all there, at least the basic elements of it. You can’t change it any more than you can choose whether to be right handed or left handed.
I’ve wanted to be a writer since I was a boy, though it seemed an unlikely outcome since I showed no real talent. But I persevered and eventually found my own row to hoe. Ignorance of other writers’ work keeps me from discouragement and I am less well-read than the average bus driver.
I’ve never thought of myself as a writer. I still don’t, despite all the writing I’ve done.
When you’re a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.
There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.
The Western poet and writer of romance has exactly the same kind of difficulty in comprehending Eastern subjects as you have in comprehending Western subjects.
Poetry is almost like my foundation for everything. I almost feel I am a better actor and writer because of it.
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.
I like the fact that by mimicking the way memory works, a writer can actually write in a fluid way – one solid scene doesn’t have to fall on another solid scene, you can just have a fragment that then dovetails into another one that took place 30 years apart from it.
You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.
A writer is like a bean plant – he has his little day, and then gets stringy.
‘Top Boy,’ for some people, was very controversial because it seemed to be portraying black people in a certain light that they thought to be stereotypical. However, what I would say is that the writer went and lived in Hackney in East London for a long time and did his research really well.
I figure anytime you put an adjective before ‘writer,’ it’s a way of dismissing the writer.
The process hasn’t changed, but the writer has developed. I still get up every morning and go to work.
Books are something social – a writer speaking to a reader – so I think making the reading of a book the center of a social event, the meeting of a book club, is a brilliant idea.
Writing is very much an emotional process; it requires you to be very in touch with your feelings. That is the opposite of what you’re taught as a medical doctor. We’re supposed to be detached and logical. Maybe because I started off as a writer and then became a doctor, I’m able to integrate those two.
It’s a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
To answer that I have to describe what I think is my responsibility as a thriller writer: To give my readers the most exciting roller coaster ride of a suspense story I can possibly think of.
No writer of a portion of the Bible was perfect. It was the direct and miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit that what they wrote is without mistake.
I’ve had aunts and uncles who not only haven’t read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.
A good writer should be able to write comedic work that made you laugh, and scary stuff that made you scared, and fantasy or science fiction that imbued you with a sense of wonder, and mainstream journalism that gave you clear and concise information in a way that you wanted it.
I’m my own boss, my own editor, my own shooter, my own writer, everything. This is all stuff I learned through trial and error… failing at a lot of things has taught me how to succeed at them eventually… you roll with the punches.
I had achieved the most important things in my life when I married Joan and had the sons. Given the choice between Joan and the boys, and being a writer, I world give up being a writer without a blink.
I’m not a lyric writer to make statements. What I enjoy doing is making paintings with lyrics, creating colorful images. I think that’s more what entertainment and music should be.
The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.
A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.
I’m not a writer because I want to make money. I’m a writer because I’m a very slow thinker, but I do care about thinking, and the only way I know how to think with any kind of finesse is by telling stories.
Every writer is a writer of the generation before.
Ultimately I’m the writer for me, but also, anytime one of my friends gets stuck with a bit, they can call me, and I’m pretty good at helping them get there.
Paul’s the writer. Yeah, I wrote a little of that stuff, but that’s just technically true. In spirit, and in essence of the truth, it doesn’t matter. So I don’t know, maybe I’m being foolish for not being technical. Yeah, I wrote a certain portion of the things.
When you are doing stand-up comedy, you are the writer, producer, director, sometimes bouncer.
As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that… That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.
I’m an escapist kind of writer.
It is comparatively easy to become a writer; staying a writer, resisting formulaic work, generating one’s own creativity – that’s a much tougher matter.
Those who prefer their English sloppy have only themselves to thank if the advertisement writer uses his mastery of the vocabulary and syntax to mislead their weak minds.
The writer presents himself to the blank page not with an open passport but an open heart.
I’m fairly competant as a director and actor, but I am Mr. Neurotic as a writer. I just don’t have enough confidence in my abilities to take criticism well. I take it personally. Start with ‘It’s a masterpiece,’ and then tell me what you think could be changed.
If I were a writer, how I would enjoy being told the novel is dead. How liberating to work in the margins, outside a central perception. You are the ghoul of literature. Lovely.
It is indeed difficult to make a living as a writer, and my advice to anyone contemplating a literary career is to have some other trade.
Style is that which indicates how the writer takes himself and what he is saying. It is the mind skating circles around itself as it moves forward.
One of the things I love, and I’m a voracious reader as well as a writer, is books that surprise me, that are not predictable.
Writing a tribe is fun. They have their own language, their own slang; they repeat it, and it becomes part of the texture of the play. For a writer, that’s thrilling. That’s when my pen flies.
I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.
As a musician and a guitar player, I can noodle as well as anybody. But from my background as a session musician, I always try to play what is called for by the lyric and listening to the song. As a writer, that’s what I do, too.
History is imperfect and biased, and it always, always has omissions. The most common omissions are the bits that the writer of that history took for granted that his readers would know.
For the vast majority of my adult life, I was a freelance writer, forever scrambling for work that paid an insulting non-amount.
Do you want to be an artist and a writer, or a wife and a lover? With kids, your focus changes. I don’t want to go to PTA meetings.
Why do I write? I have been called a writer of catastrophes, but that isn’t true. I am always looking for words of love. Hate will not save us. Only love.
Margot Livesey, my dear friend, reads all the drafts of what I write, and I read hers. We have an intense working relationship. I’ve been really lucky to know her. She’s a great reader and teacher as well as an astonishingly good writer.
Sometimes, what’s not said is just as important to the writing as what is said. As a writer, we have our voices heard. I think that, at oftentimes, the ability to allow the dialogue to recede properly into the world of the film is also a really valid sort of way to be a writer, I think.
I never thought about being a writer as I grew up. A writer wasn’t something I wanted to be. An outfielder was something to be. Most of what I know about style I learned from Roberto Clemente.
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.
To become a novelist, the most crucial thing one must do is read, read and read again – gradually you begin to think like a writer. Ideas are not found – they are shaped.
I made a conscious decision that I was not going to have children. I didn’t want others raising them, and looking after them myself would get in the way of being a musician and writer.
