In my case, I write in the past because I'm not really part of the present. I have nothing valid to say about anything current, though I have something to say about what existed then.
I write almost always in the third person, and I don't think the narrator is male or female anyway. They're both, and young and old, and wise and silly, and sceptical and credulous, and innocent and experienced, all at once. Narrators are not even hu...
If you look at a map, you see that Hawaii is in the middle of nowhere. It's 17 hours of straight flying from London. It's very far away, and sometimes you feel as if you're on another planet. But I like that. Also, that's ideal for writing.
The old sergeant from headquarters treats me like a son and takes the greatest pride in whatever I do or write. He regularly assigns me now to certain doors, and I always obey orders like the little gentleman that I am.
There are days when writing is within my power and a story unfolds along a course I've already chosen. And then there are days when the words breathe on their own and take me by the hand, leading me along unfathomed paths. Either way, the end re...
I like to take people you wouldn't really think people would write novels about: an aqueduct engineer, a code-breaker, a hedge-fund manager. It's in those sorts of lives that I find more fascination than in a CIA operative or a Marine or something li...
The characters in my stories all have quite loud lives in my head. It's a relief to get them on the page. Often they come from people I've noticed or overheard - but that is only a part of them. It's only by writing that I discover who these people r...
Sitting with a deck of cards in your hand all day is an obsession. Visiting print shops and bookstores and libraries is an obsession. And writing about this is an obsession. I think, in general, most collectors are obsessed. I think the only form of ...
I stand before you as a writer without any ground of being out of which to write: really blown about from country to country, culture to culture till I feel - till I am - nothing. As it happens, I like it that way.
Those who generate fog are Wizards of Oz hoping desperately that nobody pulls the curtain to reveal a trembling little writer behind it. This seldom happens. Readers who dare to point out that incomprehensible writing can't be comprehended risk being...
When I need the idea, I can find it immediately. I have a horror of rewriting or deleting; the parts of my composition are carried in my head 'till I can write them down, even to the last note. Then I do not alter a jot.
I am severely dyslexic, so I'm not the person who can do a lot of typing, writing and mathematics. I don't excel in anything except in things that had to do with creativity and things with my hands. I like to build things and take things apart.
My understanding of films was just as much as any young girl who watches Bollywood films. I had no idea about the whole process of filmmaking, about dialogue writing, scripts, screenplay etc. I had probably gone to two or three film shoots in my chil...
Having been an actor and a writer for so long - 20 years or so - I felt that it would be daft to go to one's grave without having directed. It's a natural extension of writing and acting, and so I knew it would happen one day.
The way they were writing Christine as this older woman who got married, which she shouldn't have. Obviously got divorced right away. Reached the glass ceiling in the police precinct. So there is a part of her that died because she knows she couldn't...
Anytime someone basically commissions a piece, I write a song based on something personal to them. I go online and I do research on that person - Wikipedia, YouTube interviews, anywhere I can find a piece of information that kind of tugs at your hear...
Overall, we had about 50 meetings where the brothers would say that I couldn't do any solo records, I couldn't write for other people, I couldn't do this and I couldn't do that. These guys were trying to nail my feet to the ground.
For me, a big part of writing psychological thrillers is choosing crimes committed for motives which would only apply to a particular person in a particular situation; a unique, one-off motive that is born out of someone's particular range of psychol...
Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them. (from Workbook)
The poet Mallarmé listened to the painter Degas complaining about his inability to write poems even though “he was full of ideas.” “My dear Degas,” Mallarmé responded, “poems are not made out of ideas. They’re made out of words.
When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.
