A writer will divine a metaphor from a pattern on a dress, or a gesture, because sunsets have been done before.
At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.
I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows.
Everyone assumes writers spend their time lounging around, writing and occasionally striking a pose whilst having a think.
The reason a writer writes a book is to forget a book and the reason a reader reads one is to remember it.
There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.
You become a great writer by writing lots and lots of stories, not by rewriting the same story over and over again.
it's been my experience that most writers don't talk about their craft--they just do it
If you want to be a writer, you have to keep writing, all the time, and when you're not writing, be thinking about and planning writing.
Writers are often given the gift of being spectacularly unhappy, so that they can record the full depth of feeling.
As a writer, I am just an actor in a play, telling a story that needs to be told.
I intend all my characters must escape from impossible situations; if they are not in trouble, then as a writer, I am.
A writer looks at an issue and asks, 'What if this were to occur? Or what if that was thrown into the mix? What would that look like?
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
Indian writers have appropriated English as an Indian language, and that gives a certain freshness to the way we write.
How some of the writers I come across get through their books without dying of boredom is beyond me.
In a lot of cases, writers discover that the novel needs to begin later in the action than they'd first thought.
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 can't say that I ever actually decided to become a writer. It kind of snuck up on me.
If you think about filmmaking as an entire spectrum, starting with the writer and ending with maybe the marketing department, the actor's contribution is a rather slender band.
The job of the writer is to take a close and uncomfortable look at the world they inhabit, the world we all inhabit, and the job of the novel is to make the corpse stink.
