I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do, so it's usually not too, too hard.
I'm still an old-school reporter at heart. Writing fiction satisfies my journalistic need to hear and relay the testimony of everyday people at the center of events.
And lucky indeed is the writer who has grown up in Ireland, for the English spoken there is so amusing and musical. (“How to Write with Style”. Essay, 1985)
I took lots of photographs and had planned to write a treatise on how it worked, but I quickly got bored with that idea and wrote a scientific fairy tale instead.
I don't know where the idea originated that memoir writing is cathartic. For me, it's always felt like playing my own neurosurgeon, sans anesthesia.
Writing help us to express our thoughts, to share experiences, to think, to love, to inspire, to motivate, to challenge, to liberate, to learn, to hope, to smile and to wonder.
I want to do something splendid… Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead… I think I shall write books.
Never give up. And most importantly, be true to yourself. Write from your heart, in your own voice, and about what you believe in.
When I was working on 'Freddie,' I had been trying to write it on a computer for many, many years, but that delete button just won't let anything go forward.
I am hard at work on the second draft ... Second draft is really a misnomer as there are a gazillion revisions, large and small, that go into the writing of a book.
In writing a series of stories about the same characters, plan the whole series in advance in some detail, to avoid contradictions and inconsistencies.
The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.
When you write a program for Android, you use the Oracle Java tools for everything, and at the very end, you push a button and say, 'Convert this to Android format.'
The question is not really about a shift to the economic cone where officers are writing about the balance of payments and the need for economic stabilization.
Mozart wrote so many works in his thirty-five years that it would take a lifetime just to write out the notes. We literally do not know how he did it.
In writing a little tragedy, 'The Gaol Gate,' I made the scenario in three lines, 'He is an informer; he is dead; he is hanged.' I wrote that play very quickly.
My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.
Now that I'm being very successful, publishers are trying to mainstream me, but I'm unabashedly genre. It's what I like to read, what I like to write.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wants to make a million dollars, the the best way would be to start his own religion.
What do you want to write? What gets your goat? What irks you to no length? If you could change the world with words, what would they be?
