Because Melissa McCarthy actually is a fat woman, she isn't allowed to make brash statements about body acceptance. She has to apologize for her body.
I don't think I wrote stories down when I was young, but I certainly made them up, perhaps sometimes losing track of the border between reality and make-believe.
I have always loved fantasy; I think probably stepping through the wardrobe with Lucy in C.S. Lewis's 'Narnia Chronicles' was my first exposure when I was really little.
I've always wanted to be a writer. Ever since I learned to read, I've wanted to share stories with others the way my favorite writers shared their stories with me.
I always feel like I'm missing out on something, that someone is having more fun than I am, so I take measures to make sure that is impossible.
You kind of create your own moral universe. It's like, well, I like myself. If other people don't like me, then whatever. I'm out of here.
I don't understand why asking people to eat a well-balanced vegetarian diet is considered drastic, while it is medically conservative to cut people open and put them on cholesterol lowering drugs for the rest of their lives.
A novel is like a gland pill - it nips off the cream of my hysterics and gets them running on track in a book where they belong instead of rioting all over my person.
If you schlep a shit job everyday, keep and feed a little secret life--whether it's writing, art, running, music, your thoughts. It's yours.
Writing a first-draft battle scene is akin to real combat—chaos, confusion, and you must keep your cool as you fire word bullets downrange.
Love it when a compelling new character kicks open your mental door, tracks mud across your brain, and props their feet up on your cerebrum.
I write fiction. It may have mystery, it may have horror, it may have fantasy, it may have love, but like life, it's all the same genre.
There is no right or wrong way to write a novel. Each journey is different for every individual work and for every writer. The first error is never to begin; the second is never to finish.
When you're writing what you love, it's the most fun you can have with your clothing still on, unless of course, you write naked.
The mind is a monkey, hopping around from thought to thought, image to image. Rarely do more than a few seconds go by in which the mind can remain single-pointed, empty.
Novels are my favorite to write and read. I do like writing personal essays, too. I'm not really a short story writer, nor do I tend to gravitate to them as a reader.
When we reach reflexively for something to dull an ache inside of us, in that very moment of reaching, we are hiding from our pain. We're storing it away. Tamping it down.
One of the stranger things about me is that I was raised as an Orthodox Jew. I went to a yeshiva until I was thirteen years old and spoke fluent Hebrew.
I do whatever is necessary in order to maintain the equanimity we all need to withstand the disappointment and rejection that are the lot of every writer, no matter where we are in our careers.
One of the things I really like about Victorian novels is the close anatomisation of character. People's gestures and mannerisms and the quality of their thought is very closely identified and analysed.
I think that, in principle, a workshop is such a beautiful idea - an environment in which writers who are collectively apprenticed to the craft of writing can come together in order to collectively improve.
