I always squirm when I read what's called 'creative nonfiction,' and the writer is lobbing gobs of emotion and language at the world, hoping some of it will stick.
I like the idea of being a working writer, not of saying that it's going to take me 30 years to write my magnum opus.
I'm not sure the risks I take are any different from what other writers take, since we all serve at the pleasure of the reader.
Censorship is the thing that stops you doing what you want to do, and what writers want to talk about is what they do, not what stops them doing it.
I got to New York when I was eighteen. I was knocking around, trying to be an actor, writer, musician, whatever happened.
The thing about American writers is that, as a group, they get stuck in the same idea: that we're a continent and the world falls away after us. And it's just nonsense.
Nonfiction writers are the packhorses of literature. We're meant to carry the story. If we can make it up and down the mountain by a reliable if not scenic route, we have delivered. Technique is optional.
I wouldn't do a project if it weren't a story I wanted to tell. That's rewarding in itself, as a writer, if you're working on a story that you enjoy telling.
I think producers are more interested in backing concepts than directors and writers. I don't think that's the right way of making a decision about whether you're going to back a film or not.
People make interesting assumptions about the profession. The writer is a mysterious figure, wandering lonely as a cloud, fired by inspiration, or perhaps a cocktail or two.
Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.
Many existing top 20 Scottish writers have flourished in part because of good turns done by institutions, arts community, libraries and bookshops.
I'd never be where I am if more successful writers hadn't taken an interest in me and done me a good turn.
I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.
For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it.
It can be said that one slip of point of view by a writer can hurt a story badly, and several slips can be fatal.' Stein on Writing
There's only one common element that united every writer I've admired... they're all incredibly well-read.
My breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers - Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few.
For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.
I think everything we do, on one level or another, as writers, most of our writing is informed by our world view.
But a writer's contribution is literary and a film is not literary. When you take that stuff off the page, and cast the people who are going to fit into those roles, that's what being a director is.
