Writers want to talk. They can't wait to tell you what they've been thinking. And because they've been in solitude, they've had some fairly decent thoughts.
There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
Reason is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing available to a writer. It's just part of the arsenal of many things available to a storyteller. Revelation, for example.
Many writers make the mistake of making their readers appear like Lazarus, without any iota of care, throwing down books to readers to crunch as if they are dogs.
The compilation of good and bad time with the traces of years make a period. Every man is the writer of his own history, make this worth reading for the generation to come.
Perhaps his tragedy is that he is the only normal writer left on earth -- and it is this that adds to his isolation and so too his so sense of guilt.
At this stage I am not involved with young adults as closely as many other writers. My children are grown up and my grandchildren are still quite young.
There's only one person who needs a glass of water oftener than a small child tucked in for the night, and that's a writer sitting down to write.
When reading a book, you are sold what some writer thought. When reading a newspaper, you are sold what someone did, and, what some advertiser made.
The mind of a writer can be a truly terrifying thing. Isolated, neurotic, caffeine-addled, crippled by procrastination, consumed by feelings of panic, self-loathing, and soul-crushing inadequacy. And that’s on a good day.
For a writer, you definitely do not want to be in the mainstream. You want to be on the edge because that's where the vantage point is. That's where you can see.
Writers spend three years rearranging 26 letters of the alphabet. It's enough to make you lose your mind day by day.
College had little effect on me. I'd have been the same writer if I'd gone to MIT, except I'd have flunked out sooner.
For me, a writer should be more like a lighthouse keeper, just out there by himself. He shouldn't get his ideas from other people all around him.
Many novice writers, students in particular, think that writing is little more than copying down their self-talk, the palaver of the voices they hear in their heads. Of course, self-talk is thinking, and writing begins with thinking.
I never get writer's block. My secret...I have purring cats in surround sound while I write...best white noise on the planet."
I think songwriters are more related to fiction writers. The Odyssey was a story in song. To me, that's so beautiful, all those painted characters, all those travels and adventures.
I try to transmit emotion and soul in my voice, but my true passion has always been writing. I feel more like a writer than anything else.
I'm always amazed by writers who tell me they plan everything at the beginning. I feel their writing days must be very bland.
With iPhones, nobody has an excuse for writer's block. If you're at Whole Foods getting your green tea extract and you have a melody, you just drop it into your voice memo and save it for later.
What do you want? What are you willing to give up to get it? Writing requires you make sacrifices. Be prepared to work hard to be a writer.
