I never wanted to be a writer. I wanted to be a book illustrator. I used to hurry home from school and draw.
If you are a writer you're at home, which means you're out of touch. You have to make excuses to get out there and look at how the world is changing.
When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.
Having children changes you forever, as a writer and as a human being. I hope it's for the better on both counts, but I guess we'll see.
My mission as a writer is to give my readers hope to carry with them, and to promote a belief that they can do anything they set their minds to.
I'm very confident that Nick Hornby always gets it right as a writer. He has the vernacular and passion. He is adroit and dry, and balances humor with the humanity of life.
Because I was a television writer for many years, I write very conversationally. I put things straight, and with a lot of humor.
It has been generally the custom of writers on natural history to take the habits and instincts of animals as the fixed point, and to consider their structure and organization as specially adapted to be in accordance with them.
Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.
I think computers are the ultimate writing tool. I'm a very slow writer, so I appreciate it every day.
My dad is a writer, and to see him always in front of a typewriter gave me the inspiration to write. He was my idol, my hero. I wanted to be just like him.
I had a great childhood. I think writers are always better off when they have more twisted childhoods, but I didn't.
There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn't even mentioned.
There are two kinds of writers; the great ones who can give you truths, and the lessor ones, who can only give you themselves.
Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.
As for Tenacious D, of course it could work as a full length movie; all it requires is a great writer and great director with an ability to think outside of conventional film comedy.
And if you want to know why great editors scare the pants off of writers everywhere, read 'Eats, Shoots and Leaves' by Lynne Truss. The punctuation police are everywhere!
Garrison Keillor read several of my poems on 'The Writer's Almanac' and I've heard from listeners nationally and internationally. That's one of the great gifts of email.
There are events which are so great that if a writer has participated in them his obligation is to write truly rather than assume the presumption of altering them with invention.
I'm such a huge fan of fan fiction, to me it's a great way for readers to become writers. It's like putting the training wheels on for writing.
Ernest Hemingway did a great deal toward making the writer an acceptable public figure; obviously, he was no sissy.
