A certain slightly cruel disregard for the feelings of living people is simply part of the package. I think a writer, if he's any good, is not an entirely benign entity in the world.
I do really enjoy Jay McInerney's wine writing. He's a good writer. He brings his fiction-writing skillset. He's not afraid to put wine in kind of a racy context and speak very candidly about it.
As for critics, one mediocre writer is more valuable than ten good critics. They are like haughty, barren spinsters lodged in a maternity ward.
On the other hand, at some level the mass of unresolved issues in Northern Ireland does influence the fact that there are so many good writers in the place.
I'm very happy with the way I write. I think I do it good. But I've never really considered myself a writer.
There is a tendency for writers to be most exciting by whatever they just wrote. Sometimes that excitement is warranted. Sometimes on further listen it's not as good as something they did a couple of years ago, but it's just not in their sights at th...
I thought I was a pretty good writer, but I didn't have anything to write about. I wanted to go out in the world, have some adventures and then write about them.
Music is just a really fun hobby that I do, because I'm actually really good about writing songs and producing. People don't realize this, but I am an excellent writer for artists.
Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page.
All writers know how important a good title is. It's the first thing readers see, along with a knock-your-socks-off cover - a seductive 'come hither' for the story within.
Reviews are for readers, not writers. If I get a bad one, I shrug it off. If I get a good one, I don't believe it
Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a...
Writing is such an industry now. In many ways, that's a good thing, in that it removes all the muse-like mystique and makes it a plain old job, accessible to everyone. But with industry comes jargon. I was aware that jargon was starting to fill those...
Should a writer have a social purpose? Any honest writer is bound to become a critic of the society he lives in, and sometimes, like Mark Twain or Kurt Vonnegut or Leo Tolstoy or Francois Rabelais, a very harsh critic indeed. The others are sycophant...
The writer's only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then. Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, secur...
I'm an immigrant writer, or an African writer, or an Ethiopian-American writer, and occasionally an American writer according to the whims and needs of my interpreters.
It is appropriate to speak of the artisans as possessed of wisdom (and not just "skill"), because the biblical writers share the understanding common to most traditional societies that the active form of wisdom is good work. Wisdom does not consist o...
All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse a...
A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.
What a writer can do, what a fiction writer or a poet or an essay writer can do is re-engage people with their own humanity.
Good style happens in one of two ways: the writer either has an inborn talent or is willing to work herself to death to get it.
