I think film had a terrible effect on horror fiction particularly in the 80s, with certain writers turning out stuff as slick and cliched as Hollywood movies.
A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction.
'Presumed Innocent' was written over a six to seven year period with intervals in between where I was figuring out the end of the book and writing other stuff... My life as a writer was carried on against the odds. I had written four unpublished nove...
America takes her writers too seriously.
A great danger, or at least a great temptation, for many writers is to become too autobiographical in their approach to their fiction. A little autobiography and a lot of imagination are best.
The training of a journalist, of working with words for thousands of hours, is extraordinarily useful for a fiction writer.
You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.
Fiction demands structures and recognizable shapes. Big surprises only draw attention to the writer's hand.
The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.
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'.
I think poets are much more dramatic, more theatrical than fiction writers.
As a passionate writer, reader and fiction lover, I enjoy sharing recommendations and promoting the work of fellow authors.
I think that writers of literary fiction would do well to read more books for children.
The deepest failures any fiction writer is likely to have are failures of not quite comprehending the truth of the story that he or she is telling.
An autobiography can distort; facts can be realigned. But fiction never lies: it reveals the writer totally.
All writers of fiction will at some point find themselves abandoning a piece of work - or find themselves putting it aside, as we gently say.
Behind every door in London there are stories, behind every one ghosts. The greatest writers in the history of the written word have given them substance, given them life. And so we readers walk, and dream, and imagine, in the city where imagination ...
This highest kind of truth is never something the artist takes as given. It's not his point of departure but his goal. Though the artist has beliefs, like other people, he realizes that a salient characteristic of art is its radical openness to persu...
If we're lucky, writer and reader alike, we'll finish the last line or two of a short story and then just sit for a minute, quietly. Ideally, we'll ponder what we've just written or read; maybe our hearts or intellects will have been moved off the pe...
The writer walks out of his workroom in a daze. He wants a drink. He needs it. It happens to be a fact that nearly every writer of fiction in the world drinks more whisky than is good for him. He does it to give himself faith hope and courage. A pers...
[I]t is the writer's duty to write fiction which promotes virtue, the good, the beautiful, and above all, the true. ... It is the writer's duty to hate injustice, to defy the powerful, and to speak for the voiceless. To be ... the severest critics of...
