What good is a writer if he can't destroy literature? And us... what good are we if we don't help as much as we can in that destruction?
There are some good songs, but not the kind of song-writing that I remember, that I like. Springsteen still does it. Paul Simon, and there are also good writers, but that doesn't dominate the charts.
A creative writing program is only as good as its teachers, and I was fortunate in having two great writers as mentors.
Well see, I'm a good enough writer that not everybody in my books talks exactly like I do.
The reserve of modern assertions is sometimes pushed to extremes, in which the fear of being contradicted leads the writer to strip himself of almost all sense and meaning.
I think there are a lot more writers who are actors than you know; they just don't have roles on famous TV shows that you recognize.
When you're doing characters from famous novels, you have a responsibility as an actor to make it what the writer intended. And then you add and expand from there to create a three-dimensional performance.
Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
I was going to be a writer. One person believed I could do it: my mom. Having her faith in me was like carrying around the Hammer of Thor.
For 35 years, I was a writer. I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren't funny. Some of them weren't appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that.
We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.
We've got a bunch of new writers now who tell me they grew up watching The Simpsons. It's bizarre, and they're writing some very funny stuff.
A friend of mine from college is married to Neil Levy, who started on 'Saturday Night Live' in the early days and is a really great guy and funny writer.
So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.
At the end of the day I'm writing comedy. If you get too realistic as a comedy writer with your disasters, it stops being funny.
I adore the company of other writers because they are so often lively minds and, frequently, blazingly funny. And of course, we get each other in a unique way.
With its missed lines and falling tombstones, 'Dark Shadows' was sometimes inadvertently funny, but what made the show work was the fact that the actors and the writers took it all very seriously.
There are some writers who feel they are elected by God. I am not. I am elected by the devil - this is clear.
That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.
Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.
There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.
