Writing has always felt like a compulsion. Even at high school there'd be times when people would ask me if I wanted to go and hang out and I'd sit home and write instead.
Well I think after leaving prison, and having written three diaries about life in prison, it became a sort of a new challenge to write another novel, to write a new novel.
It's easier to write from my own life, and it's also more fun. I always write about relationships, for instance, whether they're romantic relationships, friendships, encounters... there's always a lesson to be learned from them.
Well, in fact everybody - everybody - in the entire nation has enough stuff in their life to write about that's interesting that they could write their autobiography. And in the end that's why I find people interesting.
I write as a way of keeping myself going. You build your life around writing, and it's what gets you through. So it's partly just curiosity to see what you can do.
The part of my writing I find the most rewarding is when people write to me or speak to me in public to tell me how his or her life has been changed by my books.
The essays are very solipsistic and self-absorbed, I'm totally conscious of that. To me, book writing is fun, and I basically just write about things that are entertaining to myself.
It was just me in my basement honing my skills, hearing songs on the radio and trying to manipulate them and then writing over those, and I started with local artists in Boston, writing records for them.
I've just been writing stuff down as it comes to me. I haven't thought, 'Let me write some major opus here.'
I don't buy into the idea that an Irish writer should write about Ireland, or a gay writer should write about being gay.
The child from nine to 12 interests me very much. And so, those were the years that I like to write about, when I'm writing.
Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
Keeping a habit, in the smallest way, protects and strengthens it. I write every day, even if it's just a sentence, to keep my habit of daily writing strong.
I have long observed that the act of writing is viewed, by some, as an elite and otherworldly act, all the more so if a person isn't paid for what she writes.
I really don't think records should be made in the manner where you sit and write, and when you're finished writing, you start recording. That just seems conventional and old-fashioned to me.
I've been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don't need to write a book for adults.
The writing is really important in books that affect me. I read for the writing. The story is usually of less interest to me. It's the words that break your heart.
She could only write with him at night and she was wasting her days just sitting around. So he thought I could write with her during the day. And that was Carole King.
The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.
When things are going well, I can't write fast enough to keep up with my mind. Writing walks, speech runs and talk flies. Other times, though, it's like fishing.
There is no objection to the proposal: in order to learn to be a poet, I shall try to write a sonnet. But the thing you must try to write, when you do so, is a real sonnet, and not a practice sonnet.
