The good writing of any age has always been the product of someone's neurosis, and we'd have mighty dull literature if all the writers that came along were a happy bunch of chuckleheads.
I might enjoy writing some ghost stories set in Japan because their whole idea about the spirit world is so interesting.
Working within the limitations of the shared world generally made the writing easier, because I didn't have to invent any of the characters or background, which is usually the hardest part.
(I) only write it now because I have grown to believe that there is no dangerous idea, which does not become less dangerous when written out in sincere and careful English. ("The Adoration of The Magi")
My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?
10% of authors earn 75% of the royalties. If you’re writing a Romance novel, your odds will be slightly higher at making back your investment. Throw in a few vampires, even better.
Nine months after we submitted the original screenplay for 'The Attack,' the studio that was involved pulled out. I've been told that 'you don't write in a French way; you can't make these multicultural films.'
Reading and writing is an escape for me. Where I can imagine and become who I want to be when I want to be. Where I want to be, it's just a matter of having the imagination to do so!
Being a director, just to begin with, is just, I think, one of the hardest jobs just because you have to work in every way. You have to work with actors, you have to be involved with the producers and the writing and the action. Every department come...
I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.
People who work on the user interface side need to have empathy as a key characteristic. But if you are writing device drivers you don't really need to understand humans so well.
I would advise any beginning writer to write the first drafts as if no one else will ever read them - without a thought about publication - and only in the last draft to consider how the work will look from the outside.
My work as a screenwriter has influenced my fiction. Writing screenplays forces you to consider many elements regarding story structure and other narrative devices that can be used to enhance the infinitely more complex demands of a novel.
I've been known to write on the Underground in London and on the subway in New York. I have two or three cafes in Paris that I go into. I find a corner with a little shade, and I can work.
I've come to see that these politicians that release books - no way are they actually writing those books. Not when they are working fulltime, too. There's no way. That's their name on the book, but it's not their work. I'm sure of that. There's no w...
I normally work like a vampire. Around 8 to 9 P.M., what I call 'the spirits' actually show up, and then I just go in the booth and scream on top of a track. I only sing on the mic. I don't sit down and write anything.
I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.
It may take hundreds of pages before you begin to get a handle on the craft of writing, and your first scripts may not work. The next five to twenty may not either. However, the ones that do work owe everything to the ones that didn't.
Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.
I am not conscious of working especially hard, or of 'working' at all. Writing and teaching have always been, for me, so richly rewarding that I don't think of them as work in the usual sense of the word.
When you're on tour, you're trying to get the crowd involved and really sing and perform to them. When you're going to write and be in the studio, it's like, 'Now I have to think about me.' That's the mind-set you have to work with.
