How is your book doing?" or "How many copies have you sold?" are the questions for a salesman. To a writer, you better ask "What did you write today?".
Advice from a Romance Writer: Guys, make your woman feel pretty even on an 'off' day. Trust me, good things will come of it.
I think with pictures; I'm a very lousy writer. If I write without pictures, I become this pathetic chick sitting somewhere trying to be interesting.
Touching on universality is an important part of effective storytelling, but the problem with cliches is that they are tired and dull. And that's where writers must try to be artful.
For any writer who wants to keep a journal, be alive to everything, not just to what you're feeling, but also to your pets, to flowers, to what you're reading.
All writers are liars. They twist events to suit themselves. They make use of their own tragedies to make a better story... They are terrible people.
It's perceived as an accolade to be published as a 'literary' writer, but, actually, it's pompous and it's fake. Literary fiction is often nothing more than a genre in itself.
Alice Munro is a particular kind of short story writer in that she writes long, character-driven short stories.
And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.
Since fantasy isn't about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it's changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!
I'm not a compulsive writer. I wish I could be compulsive about something. I have no regular writing routine.
Don’t ask a writer what he’s working on. It’s like asking someone with cancer on the progress of his disease.
Dickens never joined a political party nor put forward a political programme. He was a writer who rightly saw his power as coming through his fiction.
But then all writers smoke, don't they? And drink? And sit in front of computer screens till their arteries clog and muscles atrophy?
I know writers like to think of themselves as bohemians,' he said, 'but that doesn't mean they can't behave like decent human beings.
An intellectual's weapon is writing, but sometimes people react as if it were a firearm. A writer can do a lot to change the situation, but as far as I know, no dictatorship has fallen because of a sonnet.
I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.
The advantage of writing from experience is that it often provides you with details that you would never think of yourself, no matter how rich your imagination. And specificity in description is something every writer should strive for.
In my experience, and that of a lot of other women writers, all of the questions coming at them from interviewers tend to be about how lucky they are to be where they are - about luck and identity and how the idea struck them.
The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela, where I couldn't find a place for myself, for years and years.
We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the 'ideas' with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
