Way back in the day, when I first started and had delusions of adequacy as a cartoonist, I would listen to music. When I switched to a career as a writer, I would try to listen to music, but if the songs had lyrics they would get in the way of the wo...
Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's...
I absolutely don't write for women - far, far from it. It's so not what I want to do. Some of the writers, who have helped out at the beginning and end of the process - they're all men - have suggested quite feminine subjects they want me to explore....
I made an awful mess of my first marriage. It was hard to live with me being me. I was so abnormal. I mean, most writers struggle. I hadn't struggled. I couldn't suddenly go down to the PEN Club and behave like a normal human being, because most of t...
You know, I always say musicians, they can do it on their own. They can practice their violin on their own. A painter can paint by himself. A writer can write by himself. But an actor needs a group, and the hardest thing about expanding your ability ...
I do believe that characters in novels belong to their writers and their readers pretty equally. I've learned a lot of things about the characters I write from people who read about them. Readers expand them in ways I don't think of and take them to ...
Most of all, kink comes up in my writing because that is, very simply, just the way the cat o’ nine tails flails. Any writer knows that there isn’t always an explanation for the behaviors of his or her characters and the subjects of his or her st...
I was desperately shy when I was wee. Totally lacked confidence socially. When I look back at school photographs, I'm always the one shrinking in the back. What I really wanted to do was become a writer, and I don't think the residue of that has ever...
Growing up, I never gave a thought to being a writer. All I ever wanted to be was a traveler and explorer. Science-fiction allowed me to go places that were otherwise inaccessible, which is why I started reading it. I was going to be a lawyer, but I ...
I feel that writers think with their noses to the ground, and the dark stuff kind of comes to me more, even though I really am sort of an upbeat guy. It's an honest descent into darkness. And you can't have the joy without the grief - it's why we lis...
Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, despite living through the 1917 February Revolution, forced exile amidst the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, the two World Wars and quite a lot of contr...
Writers haven't got any rockets to blast off. We don't even trundle the most insignificant auxiliary vehicle. We haven't got any military might. So what can literature do in the face of the merciless onslaught of open violence? One word of truth outw...
I found 'The Twin' sitting on a coffee table at a writers' colony in 2009. It carried praise from J.M. Coetzee. That seemed ample justification for using it to avoid my own writing. I finished it - weeping - a day later, and I've been puzzling over i...
Where would the memoir be without bipolar writers? I mean, that's what - that whole oversharing thing is really a very clear symptom of bipolar disorder. And I'm not saying that every, you know, I'm not accusing every memoirist of being bipolar. But ...
I'm never going to write a book like Anthony Sher did, you know, 'The Broadcaster Prepares.' I'm only talking to myself. I'd have liked to be a writer, or a journalist, but if things don't come easy to me I don't do them. I think if you're always thi...
There are very few professions in which people just sit down and think hard for five or six hours a day all by themselves. Of course it's why you want to become a writer — because you have the liberty to do that, but once you have the liberty you a...
Usually naive interviewers hover between two mutually contradictory convictions: one, that a text we call creative develops almost instantaneously in the mystic heat of inspirational raptus; or the other, that the writer has followed a recipe, a kind...
Writers more interested in literature than the truth ensure that they never come out with either thing — one reason that the word literature today sounds so fake, as if you were to insist on saying cuisine every time you meant food. Food, as in...
Many theologians believe the Gospel writers include miracle stories in order to prove that Jesus is divine. But miracles are not proof of deity. Many Old Testament prophets heal people and even raise them from the dead, yet they are mere mortals. Jes...
10 Steps to Becoming a Better Writer Write. Write more. Write even more. Write even more than that. Write when you don’t want to. Write when you do. Write when you have something to say. Write when you don’t. Write every day. Keep writing.
I see Sarah framed in the light of her doorway and it is like looking at a painting that emanate a mixture of wishes and truths about someone I loved - from a time I can already vividly remember. I wonder if this is a hazard of being a writer: a sens...
