The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.
I never thought of myself as either a woman or a man. I thought of myself as a person who was born to a writer, who was doomed to be a writer.
Don't let yourself be amazed by the imagination of a writer and his words, writers are almost all the time in a love-hate relationship with words.
The true writer, the born writer, will scribble words on scraps of litter, the back of a bus tickets, on the wall of a cell.
At one time if you were a black writer you had to be one of the best writers in the world to be published. You had to be great. Now you can be good. Mediocre. And that's good.
A writer should get as much education as possible, but just going to school is not enough; if it were, all owners of doctorates would be inspired writers.
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
I'm pleased to have outsold great writers. But I'm not insane - I realize I am a writer people buy to take on vacation.
One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm not any good at it.
I don't know about other writers, but for myself, to write I must be relatively quiet - it's very difficult to write with the telephone and the doorbell ringing and conversation going on; I'm not that good a writer to write through all that!
There is always a certain leap of faith that editors have made with their nonfiction writers. If the trust is broken, things can get very embarrassing for the writers and the publisher.
Nowadays they have 12 directors and 15 producers and 30 writers. And all the writers want their lines said a certain way-which isn't necessarily funny. I mean the lines aren't necessarily so funny to begin with.
As for most writers, language is vital for me: a writer's ability to render a fictional world - characters, landscape, emotions - into something original that alters or deepens my understanding of both literature and life.
I was a writer before 'Eat, Pray, Love,' and I'll be a writer after it's over. It's what I want to do for the rest of my life.
But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.
How often have I met and disliked writers whose books I love; and conversely, hated the books and then wound up liking the writer? Too often.
Literature does not exist in a vacuum. Writers as such have a definite social function exactly proportional to their ability as writers. This is their main use.
Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.
Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.
The public figure of the writer, the writer-character, the 'personality-cult' of the author, are all becoming for me more and more intolerable in others, and consequently in myself.
You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.
