I don't write that much horror. People tell me my books are scary, but they're not really; I don't go there.
I don't usually think of my writing as a 'challenge' because I enjoy the process so much. I suppose that's what's helped me to avoid 'writer's block' all these years.
I wasn't involved, except to the degree that they sent me drafts of the script as the writer turned them in. They asked me at one point to write a memo about what I thought of it.
Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.
I wanted to express myself more fully through writing and directing. It just feels like a package deal. Anytime you create anything, you try to exert mastery over your world.
If you criticize what you’re doing too early you’ll never write the first line.” [ , interview with Jodi Daynard, No. 113, Winter II 1989]
We do not need to proselytise either by our speech or by our writing. We can only do so really with our lives. Let our lives be open books for all to study.
Cartooning is for people who can't quite draw and can't quite write. You combine the two half-talents and come up with a career.
Writing is a journey of discovery because until you start, you never know what will happen, and you can be surprised by what you do - expect the unexpected!
The type of stories I write are about young people grappling with the biggest problems in their lives, often problems that are bigger than they're actually capable of solving.
After I won the Oscar for 'Pollock,' some newspaper printed, 'She should get a million-dollar bump.' My sisters would write me, 'You're gonna get this million-dollar bump!'
There is a way in which all writing is connected. In a second language, for example, a workshop can liberate the students' use of the vocabulary they're acquiring.
If one book's done this well, you want to write another one that does just as well. There's that horror of the second novel that doesn't match up.
The one thing you have to do if you write a book is put yourself in someone else's shoes. The reader's shoes. You've got to entertain them.
There's something with the physical size of America... American writers can write about America and it can still feel like a foreign country.
Whenever you're reporting, there's always something you can't say or write, but the questions, you always want to get as close to that line as possible. You want to ask the tough questions.
I take six or seven years to write really small books. There is a kind of aesthetic of leanness, of brevity.
For me, writing a novel is like solving a puzzle. But I don't intend my novels as puzzles. I intend them as invitations to dance.
It is vitally important for me, both personally and for my writing, to be able to return to China freely, so being barred entry has caused me deep concern and distress.
When the show started out, it was like all of a sudden we had to do 35 episodes and we had just a month and a half to write them, and it took me a while to realize that I was in charge.
Every day I wake up afraid that I won't be able to write, that today is the day it has left me.
