One can't write without having read - you have to read before beginning to write - and universities offer a very good opportunity to read.
Writing a book about yourself is like therapy, and you go 'Oh My God, that's the reason that happened.' Writing about it, you're forced to really examine things.
For me, writing has always come out of living a fairly to-the-bone kind of life, just really being present to a lot of life. The writing has been really a byproduct of that.
If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.
Writing is a solitary endeavor, but not a lonely one. When you write, your world is populated by the characters you invent, and you feel those people filling your life.
A straight writer can write a gay novel and not worry about it, and a gay novelist can write about straight people.
Writing is literally transformative. When we read, we are changed. When we write, we are changed. It's neurological. To me, this is a kind of magic.
There should be more to writing than entertaining an already-brain-dead society and making money. If not,then you miss the point of writing.
Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.
Every person who speaks or writes for the public will make an occasional faux pas, and sooner or later will write or say something inappropriate.
It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
The real trouble with the writing game is that no general rule can be worked out for uniform guidance, and this applies to sales as well as to writing.
My goal is not to have everlasting fame, it is simply to write the stories that are asking me to write them and to share them with the people that want to hear them.
The whole purpose of writing a book is to be understood - if other people write about you, they try to guess why you did things, or they hear things from other people.
To write is to release the soul. So write. What right have we to leave a thing of such beauty bottled within ourselves?
The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!
Do not let any record company disturb your creative flow. You are not writing for the record company. You're writing for the public.
The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and all time.
I'm a fairly fast, but sloppy writer, so I'm a big fan of re-writing, and re-writing again.
I've always thought that you live in the present, you live in a specific present. You are writing, present tense, so write in the present as it is.
Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard." (Interview with NEH chairman Bruce Cole, , July/Aug. 2002, Vol. 23/No. 4)
