Any writer, I suppose, feels that the world into which he was born is nothing less than a conspiracy against the cultivation of his talent.
Given that external reality is a fiction, the writer's role is almost superfluous. He does not need to invent the fiction because it is already there.
It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.
Most crime fiction, no matter how 'hard-boiled' or bloodily forensic, is essentially sentimental, for most crime writers are disappointed romantics.
In Britain I'm sometimes regarded as a suspiciously Europeanized writer, who has this rather dubious French influence.
As a writer, my main objective is to tell the story urgently - as if whispering it into one ear - and to know the characters intimately.
The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role.
My taste in the films I've taken as an actor is similar to what I'd do a director or writer: all quite odd, challenging stuff, slightly off-the-wall.
You know what writers say about their long books: If I had another year, the book would be half as long.
Nothing's a better cure for writer's block than to eat ice cream right out of the carton.
I really want my career to be as an actor-writer-director-producer, you know? I don't know what will be stronger than the other.
It's one of the strangest attributes of this profession that when we writers get exhausted writing one thing, we relax by writing another.
I felt uncomfortable calling myself a writer until I started with 'The New Yorker,' and then I was like, 'Okay, now you can call yourself that.'
I believe that a writer is a person who writes. An author is a person who has written.
A true writer should be able to write about any color. It's the story they tell that should affect people, not the race.
This might be one way to start talking about differences between the early postmodern writers of the fifties and sixties and their contemporary descendants.
I hate being a writer. i tend to stick my emotions in things that cannot reciprocate. I've become a whore for my craft.
[I]f the writer does his job right, what he basically does is remind the reader of how smart the reader is.
I think it's a short story writer's duty, as well as writing well about emotions and characters, to write story.
You can tell when a writer moves out of a place of struggle and into a place of comfort, and it's always a bad thing.
You're meant to have an unhappy childhood to be a writer, but there's a lot to be said for a very happy one that just lets you get on with it.
