We read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.
The writer who loses his self-doubt, who gives way as he grows old to a sudden euphoria, to prolixity, should stop writing immediately: the time has come for him to lay aside his pen.
My most important piece of advice to all you would-be writers: When you write, try to leave out all the parts readers skip.
The first prerequisite for fine literature is that the writer must see the language not as a transparent medium for self-expression or the representation of reality, but as a medium one must struggle with to make it do one's bidding.
But the recurrent ambiguity of the American tale of the supernatural reveals both a fascination with the possibility of numinous experience and a perplexity about whether there was, in fact, anything numinous to be experienced. Writers often delighte...
You may think that you don't want to read about the problems of being brought up Mennonite, but the great thing about books is that you'll read anything a good writer wants you to read.
You never stopped thinking of yourself as a writer biding his time in the Department of Factual Verification. But between the job and the life there wasn't much time left over for emotion recollected in tranquillity.
Theoretically there's no reason one should get [writer's block], if one understands that writing, after all, is only writing, neither something one ought to feel deeply guilty about nor something one ought to be inordinately proud of.
I speak, I speak, and truth at that. Writers are a curious breed: brooding, fickle, alternately loving and hating their work—and each other. You’re my friend? Don’t pick up that pen!
Anytime there's a bad female stand-up somewhere, some dickhead Interblogger will deduce that “women aren't funny.” Using that same math, I can state: Male comedy writers piss in cups.
We are all shaped by where we grow up, though that shaping takes different forms. I don't think there's any doubt that coming of age in Winnipeg both opened my eyes and made me hungry - if I can subvert all claims to be a real writer by mixing metaph...
I was a boarding school product from the age of eight, and I hated it. Though I do have a theory that boarding school is good training for writers because it's so desperately lacking in privacy: you make space for yourself by having an interior life.
Cory Doctorow should be too busy for lunch. He's co-editor of, and a prolific contributor to, one of the most influential blogs in the world, Boing Boing. Over the past decade the Canadian-born writer has published 16 books, mostly science fiction no...
What fiction offers us is an intimacy shorn of the messy contingencies of human existence - gender, race, class or age. Those moments of transcendence when we exclaim 'You know exactly what I mean!' depend for much of their force on the anonymous cha...
I'm definitely one of those actresses who comes to a set knowing how I want to do a scene, and I definitely love input from my directors and my writers. I know that there's some actors who like to be left alone, they like to be very independent, but ...
Largely this is a class thing - writers tend to be cosseted little middle-class kiddies who think that the world owes them a royalty cheque. But just doing it - being in your room for years on end, locked in your head, alone with invented ghosts - it...
I think good art should always be entertaining, or at least give pleasure of some sort. And my chief goal as a writer has always been to tell a good story and give my readers a good time.
I strongly believe that the art of the novel works best when the writer identifies with whoever he or she is writing about. Novels in the end are based on the human capacity, compassion, and I can show more compassion to my characters if I write in a...
Some of the best art in the world is collaborative, a mix of voices that are stronger together than separate. Take the Beatles, for example. Or every great movie ever made. We like to say they're the director's vision, but really, they're huge collab...
Younger than Morini and Pelletier, Espinoza studied Spanish literature, not German literature, at least for the first two years of his university career, among other sad reasons because he dreamed of being a writer.
I know nothing of writing books properly. I write in the same manner I live life: one feeling at a time. If this makes me a bad writer, then I might hope to author several bad books.
