The same tools that make any writer good, plus a cheerful willingness to suspend belief.
While I was in college becoming a good Catholic I was also becoming a writer - one haunted by Catholicism.
Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
A good short-story writer has an instinct for sketching in just enough background to ground the specific story.
Unfortunately, there are writers whose only concern is how good they could make themselves look on a title.
I will say that the prison regime is rather a good one for a writer because you have plenty of time to write.
In the hands of good writers, you have the opportunity to present both sides of an opinion equally and that you leave it to the audience to listen and then make up their own minds.
I suppose that writers should, in a way, feel flattered by the censorship laws. They show a primitive fear and dread at the fearful magic of print.
How many writers in history have ever been as famous as Stephen King? He casts an awfully long shadow.
I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.
My parents are both really, really funny, and my little sister is a really good painter, and my other sister is a really good writer.
The thing I have to do as a writer, and that God permits me to do, is that I have to be willing to fail.
As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.
The fancy that extraterrestrial life is by definition of a higher order than our own is one that soothes all children, and many writers.
I don't lead a writer's life. And I think that can be a source of suspicion and irritation to some people.
I learned so much by being an actor, and part of my sort-of development as a writer is big thanks to the scripts I read in my acting life.
Life and people are complex. A writer as an artist doesn't have the personality of a politician. We don't see the world that simply.
In a certain sense, a writer is an exile, an outsider, always reporting on things, and it is part of his life to keep on the move. Travel is natural.
Every writer hopes or boldly assumes that his life is in some sense exemplary, that the particular will turn out to be universal.
Writers and journalists tend to be simplistic about politics when, like all other areas of life, it's more complicated.
A pilot is like the most extensive dress rehearsal you can ever imagine, because the writers are learning about the actors, the actors are learning about the characters.
