It's possible I'm a weird person, you know, and if I could only write for people who are like me, I wouldn't have any audience at all. Ultimately, I'm my audience. I'm writing stories for myself. I don't have kids of my own, and I don't hang around k...
At times I have a beat first and then I write. Sometimes I have a melody in my head and I pick up the guitar to develop the song. Other times I just write without any melodies, and I end up using those lyrics when I think I have the appropriate instr...
When authors write from personal experiences,straight from the heart,it touches the readers. Their work speaks out to all who read it,and most of the time,people can relate to what was written. I have always believed that books can change people's li...
When I write, I feel that I'm writing with my intellect. When I paint, I think it's some other force making me paint. I - as I wrote in my novel 'My Name is Red' - watch with amazement what my hand is doing on the paper, what kind of line, what kind ...
I'm always amazed by those people who get up at 5 and write till 8 and then eat a peach and walk their canary and write two hours more and then are free to collect firewood for the rest of the afternoon. Because I just walk around thinking about play...
Art is a conversation we are all invited to and are all worthy to participate in. Yes, great works can be intimidating, but no one else in the world has what you have—your voice, your eyes, your feeling and perspective. Other people have written gr...
I hate to be a nag, but you have to read. Like most authors, I run creative writing workshops from time to time, and speak, when invited to writers' circles and at summer schools, and I'm continually amazed at the number of would-be writers who scarc...
I don't think anyone sits down and thinks, 'I know, I'll be a chick-lit writer.' You write the book that you want to write and then other people say, 'Oh, that's chick-lit.' You say, 'Okay.' But it's not like you look around and go to a careers fair ...
Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, uns...
I knew I could only play Cyrano if he were Americanized. I had no intention of writing the script myself. I was afraid of it. You're playing with fire when you tamper with a classic. So I went looking for a writer. But it was such a personal idea, an...
Writing engenders in us certain attitudes toward language. It encourages us to take words for granted. Writing has enabled us to store vast quantities of words indefinitely. This is advantageous on the one hand but dangerous on the other. The result ...
In my writing class, we never, ever talk about the writing - ever. We never address a story that's been read. I also won't let anyone look at the person who's reading. No eye contact; everybody has to draw a spiral. And I would like to do a drawing c...
Discipline allows magic. To be a writer is to be the very best of assassins. You do not sit down and write every day to force the Muse to show up. You get into the habit of writing every day so that when she shows up, you have the maximum chance of c...
I read obsessively when I'm writing. I think there are two kinds of fiction writers, those who read incessantly while they write and those who can't read at all, lest their individual voices get overwhelmed, or tainted somehow. I'm the first kind. To...
Several people, not just reviewers, took me to task for writing about what they called the working classes - something I've been doing for 40 years. I thought that was contemptible - what do they want to do, ghettoize the working class as a subject? ...
Sex is hard to write about because you lose the universal and succumb to the particular. We all have our different favorites. sex is impossible to write about. Lawrence and Updike have given it their all, and the result is still uneasy and unsure. It...
Stories about mental aberration and oddity only make sense in context. Just how do people live with someone who is peculiar, gifted, strange or alien? It's odd because there's a little part of me that wants to write about exotic, strange bizarre subj...
Write every day, line by line, page by page, hour by hour. Do this despite fear. For above all else, beyond imagination and skill, what the world asks of you is courage, courage to risk rejection, ridicule and failure. As you follow the quest for sto...
If you want to write, you can. Fear stops most people from writing, not lack of talent, whatever that is. Who am I? What right have I to speak? Who will listen to me if I do? You’re a human being, with a unique story to tell, and you have every rig...
People who make snide comments to authors like "anyone can write a book" or "well, you did it, so obviously I can/it can't be that hard" or poke at a book because it's "romance" or "genre fiction" and act like that somehow makes it substandard becaus...
Why does one begin to write? Because she feels misunderstood, I guess. Because it never comes out clearly enough when she tries to speak. Because she wants to rephrase the world, to take it in and give it back again differently, so that everything is...
