Having deadlines helps because people are constantly breathing down my neck, and tapping their toes waiting for pages. So I just have to work nine to five. If I didn't have deadlines then I might be more of a golden hour kind of guy, writing from eig...
It's rare that I'm not at work on some sort of craft project. I've often enthused about the need to make things; how it employs a unique set of muscles - physical, intellectual, spiritual - that I can attain a state of flow when making something that...
I paint and I draw and I write and I do other things too, and recently some people at school were asking if I'd ever publish any of my work. But I almost feel like I would have to publish it under another name because there's a definition of me out t...
I believe that a writer learns from every story he writes, and when you try different things, you learn different lessons. Working with other writers, as in Hollywood or in a shared world series, will also strengthen your skills, by exposing you to n...
I'll come up with an idea for a character, and I'll write some jokes and make sure that that character is going to have some legs to it - that it's really going to work. If I can come up with jokes and material that I think will work, then I make a c...
For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank...
Neil Gaiman has reached a masterful stage in his writing where he deserves his own adjective, which could be extended to younger writers following in his wake: Gaimanesque. His work, while variegated, exhibits a unity of vision, voice, and tone that ...
I think my characters with my fingers, I think my characters with my guts. But when I say I think them, that is what I do, I feel them with the sympathetic neurons and I work out with my brain what it is that I am trying to write about, or I can't do...
I don't know that I 'look up' to them, but in our predictably partisan media world, I admire journalists who are genuinely nonpartisan and totally fearless in their work - people who have no interest in being invited to the cocktail party. I don't ag...
If you look at most women's writing, women writers will describe women differently from the way male writers describe women. The details that go into a woman writer's description of a female character are, perhaps, a little more judgmental. They're l...
Younger women tend to be busier, wearing more layers and more make-up. I don't know if it's because older women are more confident, or just that we don't care any more. But that pared-down approach is the same with the sentences I write; I take out a...
Taxi-drivers in Frankfurt are said to dislike the annual Book Fair because literary folk, instead of being shuttled to prostitutes like respectable members of other convening professions, prefer to stay in their hotels and fuck one another
It was hidden inside another book. One Valentine was unlikely to ever open." Magnus smiled crookedly. "Simple Recipes for Housewives. No one can say your mother didn't have a sense of humor.
It is clear that the books owned the shop rather than the other way about. Everywhere they had run wild and taken possession of their habitat, breeding and multiplying, and clearly lacking any strong hand to keep them down.
The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience. The law embodies the story of a nation's development through many centuries, and it cannot be dealt with as if it contained only the axioms and corollaries of a book of mathematics.
I like best to have one book in my hand, and a stack of others on the floor beside me, so as to know the supply of poppy and mandragora will not run out before the small hours.
Stranger, pause and look; From the dust of ages Lift this little book, Turn the tattered pages, Read me, do not let me die! Search the fading letters finding Steadfast in the broken binding All that once was I!
A truly great work of art breaks beyond the bounds of the period and culture in which it is created, so final judgement on a current book has to be deferred until it can be seen outside this present moment.
It is a most wonderful comfort to sit alone beneath a lamp, book spread before you, and commune with someone from the past whom you have never met.
There is not one big cosmic meaning for all; there is only the meaning we each give to our life, an individual meaning, an individual plot, like an individual novel, a book for each person.
Now she sat in their dining hall, a book in her lap but unread while she stared blankly across the room.Bercelak’s kin kept themselves busy by sharpening weapons, reading, talking, or setting things on fire with small bursts of flame.
