I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.
When I first read the story 'Guts' in workshop - my fellow writers that I've been meeting with for almost 20 years - they laughed; they didn't have any kind of shock reaction.
I don't think I would have been a writer if I hadn't been a mother. I wanted to construct something that contained some of these feelings that I had, some of these discoveries or revelations.
Give yourself to reading.’... You need to read. Renounce as much as you will all light literature, but study as much as possible sound theological works, especially the Puritanic writers, and expositions of the Bible.
As a writer, as a lyricist, you're just trying to make sure that you're not repeating yourself. And that's a danger for a lot of people. So for me, I just try to keep taking corners and trying to find new paths.
Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.
I always wanted to be a writer! But I wanted to do other things, too - be a psychologist, a librarian, et cetera. Now I've decided that reading fiction that features characters who are in those professions will do.
I don't think there's been any writer like Samuel Beckett. He's unique. He was a most charming man and I used to send him my plays.
Write while the heat is in you. The writer who postpones the recording of his thoughts uses an iron which has cooled to burn a hole with. He cannot inflame the minds of his audience.
From my close observation of writers... they fall into two groups: 1) those who bleed copiously and visibly at any bad review, and 2) those who bleed copiously and secretly at any bad review.
Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.
I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better.
As long as a film stays unmade, the book is entirely yours, it belongs to the writer. As soon as you make it into a film, suddenly more people see it than have ever read the book.
Writers sometimes write things for me and I like to see what they write because I want to see what their take on my delivery is or what they think that I can do with something. So I kind of leave that to them.
I still think most writers are just kids who refuse to grow up. We're still playing imaginary games, with our imaginary friends.
I'm transitioning to television and film, but ultimately, I want to have a stronger presence on the web and be able to curate the content that I want to see. To bring attention to other filmmakers and writers.
When a young writer comes up to me with an ambitious idea for a 20-book series, I usually tell him to maybe try something smaller to start off with.
And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.
When I started at the 'Guardian,' though, I couldn't think of anything we saw eye to eye on, except feminism, and even this would soon be arguable as 'Guardian' writers queued up to drool over Eminem.
When writers die they become books, which is, after all, not too bad an incarnation." [As attributed by Alastair Reid in , The New Yorker, June 24, 1996; as well as in , The New Yorker, July 7, 1986]
As a writer, I had learned a lot on 'Margin Call' about embracing the weaknesses of a narrative and of a project. A story always has an inherent narrative weakness.
