I think an artist, in my definition of that word, would not be someone who takes sides with the emperor against his powerless subjects. That's different from prescribing a way in which a writer should write.
I read mostly Irish, African, Japanese, South American, and African writers. You can count on Scandinavian literature for a certain kind of darkness, a modern mythic style.
Although it was in primitive times and differently called the Lord's day or Sunday, yet it was never denominated the Sabbath; a name constantly appropriate to Saturday, or the Seventh day both by sacred and ecclesiastical writers.
I don't know a writer who doesn't feel some sense of glamour and magic and a complex, wistful sadness emanating from the expats of the twenties in France. Some of the sadness, of course, is that we weren't there.
The vast majority of writers out there, they finish their books, and no one cares whether their book is late or ever comes out at all. And then it comes out, and two reviews are published, and it sells 12 copies.
I wanted to do - there was this film called 'Magic' that Anthony Hopkins did. And the director wanted me. The writer wanted me. Joe Levine said no, I don't want any comedians in this.
I don't believe in kicking away ladders. By that, I mean the ladders by which I ascended as a young writer, small magazines that didn't pay anything, and that sort of thing.
When he died, Emerson was thought of as the representative American writer par excellence, and his point of view was still so potent that William James was honored to be asked to speak at a centenary celebration.
What I really want is to be recognized as a writer; that someday, my poetry — this is an interesting paradox — would be taught in English classes; for my name, along with my poetry, to exist 500 years from now.
Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself...It's a self-exploratory operation that is endless. An exorcism of not necessarily his demon, but of his divine discontent.
Years ago, the writers were telling me that I'd make the Hall of Fame, so I kind of prepared a speech. But somewhere along in the 28 years, it got lost.
I do not outline. There are writers I know and count as my friends who certainly do it the other way, but for me, part of the adventure is not knowing how it's going to turn out.
[David] Maraniss sees [Barack] Obama as a man with "a moviegoer's or writer's sensibility, where he is both participating and observing himself participating, and views much of the political process as ridiculous or surreal, even as he is deep into i...
The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, swam out of all the unsinkable ships sank. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.
I think part of what I like about being a fiction writer is that I can inhabit something that's beyond the limits of my own personality.
Honorary degrees and lifetime achievement awards are very encouraging. I know that it might sound strange that a writer who has published many books still needs encouragement, but this is true.
For the writer, the serial killer is, abstractly, an analogue of the imagination's caprices and amorality; the sense that, no matter the dictates and even the wishes of the conscious social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is inco...
It's my theory that many writers were the confidantes of one or the other parent. I was my mother's confidante; she had been her mother's confidante.
When I think about writers who use fiction as social commentary and to raise social awareness but who are also very popular, I think of Dickens.
There are writers' rooms that will write episodes all together, who will break into little groups and write certain scenes. Everyone's process can be a little bit malleable. Everyone tries to get into a groove or find what works for their room.
Some people like to purge out a draft and just let it go and then go back and fix it, but I'm a writer-rewriter. I can't move on until I feel like it's presentable.
