I'm a comic writer, in some ways, and a comic person when I'm up at a podium, in order to disguise the fact that in my heart I'm disgustingly earnest.
Inside of all the makeup and the character and makeup, it's you, and I think that's what the audience is really interested in... you, how you're going to cope with the situation, the obstacles, the troubles that the writer put in front of you.
I'm not a writer who looks for the fantastic and the sensational. I like the world we've got. If there is anything special and magical, I have to find it in the ordinary stuff.
That's what fiction writers do: create characters and do terrible things to them for the entertainment of others. If they feel guilty enough, they write happy endings.
I don't categorize myself as an 85-year-old woman who has written an erotic novel. I categorize myself as a writer who's written an erotic novel.
I wanted to be a politician and a movie star. But I was born a writer. If you're born that, you can't change it. You're going to do it whether you want to or not.
I always knew I wanted to be a writer. I just wasn't sure what I wanted to do as a money-making job.
When I try to understand somebody, create a character, I fall into them. When I think writers are telling me what to think, I get harrumphy.
You have to dream intentionally. Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally.
I heard David Sedaris read live recently which was a complete delight. Few writers make me laugh out loud on the bus. He does.
Shakespeare is in many ways an African writer and 'Hamlet' would be seen as a very accurate historical saga about an African kingdom.
Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad.
Russia, France, Germany and China. They revere their writers. America is still a frontier country that almost shudders at the idea of creative expression.
The most evocative thing to me is probably when a writer and a group of performers can collectively put together something compelling that asks the really simple question: 'How do we live?'
I wanted the press to become something of a movement. Not a movement committed to a particular 'ism', but a gathering together of writers with an aesthetic approach to literature and with a lust for excellence.
Some literary types subscribe to the notion that being a writer like Salinger entitles a person to remain free of the standards that might apply to mere mortals.
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe. -John Muir, naturalist, explorer, and writer (1838-1914)
The writer sat besides the weeping Gilgamesh, witnessed the sinking of the unsinkable ships. He was there, and he wasn't. Like a naturalist observing the tarn of life from an unseen bubble of neutrality.
Asking a working writer what he thinks about critics is like asking a lamp-post what it feels about dogs." [ , October 31, 1977]
I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are doing is very subversive and very important.
And that's another piece of advice I'll give junior writers; when you get to the point where they take you to lunch, let the editor suggest where to go.
