People have no idea what a hard job it is for two writers to be friends. Sooner or later you have to talk about each other's work.
When you're a writer you no longer see things with the freshness of the normal person. There are always two figures that work inside you.
All writers want to know that someone is reading their work, taking them seriously. It provides a kind of moral support.
I've always loved brainstorming with other writers, and I consider having my work critiqued a part of that brainstorming.
I think as an artist or a writer it's OK to want to control your own work.
Serious writers pretend they don't care about film adaptations of their work, but it's a colossal lie: We all care.
The only thing I was fit for was to be a writer, and this notion rested solely on my suspicion that I would never be fit for real work, and that writing didn't require any.
If you want to find out what a writer or a cartoonist really feels, look at his work. That's enough.
This time it was the sentence opening the last part of a story I had worked on for months: a sentence as is often worked off paper first. The pace of narrative and interest in character do not readily help the writer's hand to set down a sentence of ...
This is the same establishment that all those who want, or rather aspire to, to be literary figures of the century, artists, painters and sculptors want acceptance from and approval. They want to be looked up to. Young and upcoming poets must approac...
Literature, like magic, has always been about the handling of secrets, about the pain, the destruction, and the marvelous liberation that can result when they are revealed. Telling the truth when the truth matters most is almost always a frightening ...
I love the writers of my thousand books. It pleases me to think how astonished old Homer, whoever he was, would be to find his epics on the shelf of such an unimaginable being as myself, in the middle of an unrumored continent. I love the large minor...
It's okay to embark on writing because you think it will get you love. At least it gets you going, but it doesn't last. After a while you realize that no one cares that much. Then you find another reason: money. You can dream on that one while the bi...
I will quote one sentence from this text, namely, the one with which it ended. It was also the sentence which finally dissolved the writer’s block that had inhibited the author from starting work. I have since used it whenever I myself have been gr...
Here's what I want from a book, what I demand, what I pray for when I take up a novel and begin to read the first sentence: I want everything and nothing less, the full measure of a writer's heart. I want a novel so poetic that I do not have to turn ...
A writer’s life is half ambition and half anxiety, and there has to be both. It is no good writing a novel and feeling fine, and it is no good writing a whole novel feeling miserable. It has to be both, that mixture of anxiety and ambition, and you...
Most inspirational writers were born as driftwood and will say they have been beaten against every shoreline during their life. We understand storms. We understand drowning. We understand being devalued. We understand being stranded alone on a beach....
Think of this – that the writer wrote alone, and the reader read alone, and they were alone with each other. True, the writer may have been alone also with Spenser's golden apples in the Faerie Queene, Proserpina's garden, glistening bright among t...
It is not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer.
I have always noticed that these artists and writers are very unbalanced
When you believe you've become the best writer you can be… you still aren’t.
