Our most famous writers are Faulkner and Eudora Welty and Flannery O'Connor. It would make sense that the poetry would reflect some of those same values, some of the same techniques.
I was going to be a writer. One person believed I could do it: my mom. Having her faith in me was like carrying around the Hammer of Thor.
For 35 years, I was a writer. I wrote a lot of jokes. Some of them weren't funny. Some of them weren't appropriate. Some of them were downright offensive. I understand that.
We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.
We've got a bunch of new writers now who tell me they grew up watching The Simpsons. It's bizarre, and they're writing some very funny stuff.
A friend of mine from college is married to Neil Levy, who started on 'Saturday Night Live' in the early days and is a really great guy and funny writer.
So while it is true that I find really dark stuff funny sometimes, it's also true that as a writer of books I want to have the whole range of human emotions.
At the end of the day I'm writing comedy. If you get too realistic as a comedy writer with your disasters, it stops being funny.
I adore the company of other writers because they are so often lively minds and, frequently, blazingly funny. And of course, we get each other in a unique way.
With its missed lines and falling tombstones, 'Dark Shadows' was sometimes inadvertently funny, but what made the show work was the fact that the actors and the writers took it all very seriously.
There are some writers who feel they are elected by God. I am not. I am elected by the devil - this is clear.
That writer does the most who gives his reader the most knowledge and takes from him the least time.
Successful fiction does not need to be validated by 'real life'; I cringe whenever a writer is asked how much of a novel is 'real'.
There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.
Really, as a writer, I believe that if you're going to write about your own life, you need to do it as honestly and candidly as you are capable.
In retrospect, it seems like everything in my life led to me becoming a writer. I just didn't realise it at the time.
The First Amendment has the same role in my life as a citizen and a writer as the sun has in our ecosystem.
When you're a writer, you pull your life into your work. My first love is cinema. That's where I want to be judged.
The life of the professional writer - like that of any freelance, whether she be a plumber or a podiatrist - is predicated on willpower. Without it there simply wouldn't be any remuneration, period.
The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks.
I became a writer because I love to read, yet I never get to unless I'm reviewing a book or doing research.
