I loved to read and to write, but then something happened. As I made my way through school, I kept getting handed books to read that didn't excite me and didn't even remotely connect to the realities of my life.
That's the whole point of writing to me - I put my characters under incredible duress, and from that comes their truth. In a way, I'm using them to try to find my own answers in life.
There were always moments where I'd say, 'What else can I do with my life?' But when I was 30 years old and discovered I could write - I wrote 'Black Cloud' in six weeks - it opened up a whole new world for me.
I was a 'young adult' when I wrote 'The Outsiders,' although it was not a genre at the time. It's an interesting time of life to write about, when your ideals get slammed up against reality, and you must compromise.
To have someone who never makes a mistake, never finds her personal life in disarray, never worries about work-life balance? I think that would be unreal. What I'm writing is real.
When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make...
I like dialogue that is slightly more brittle than life. I have always admired and wished to write one of those 1940s film scripts where every line is written with a sharpness and economy that is frankly artificial.
As a writer, as much as I try, I can't stop writing female characters. They have so much more to offer; they have to wear so many different hats. There's so much wonderful gray matter in a female's life that it just makes for a stronger character.
Politics disappears; it vanishes. What remains constant is human life. So I try to develop a perspective in my writing where politics is just one of the pieces of furniture in this furnished world. It is not the purpose. It is not the goal.
The joy I get from winning a major championship doesn't even compare to the feeling I get when a kid writes a letter saying: 'Thank you so much. You have changed my life.'
To be an artist, you don't have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It's just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.
What I'm doing is writing stories about women who care about justice. They are women who think about the difference between right and wrong, what's legal and illegal, ethical and unethical, moral and immoral.
When I was writing my dissertation, I wrote about Freud and the process of sublimation, which is when you learn to stop breast-feeding, or stop going to the toilet whenever you want to. It's about learning to repress a desire for instant gratificatio...
Doctoral training is devoted almost entirely to learning to do research, even though most Ph.Ds who enter academic life spend far more time teaching than they do conducting experiments or writing books.
When I first started making music, it was learning other people's songs and putting them onto four-track. Like Beatles songs and stuff. When I started writing, I used the singing side of the production as a vehicle for melody and lyrical ideas.
'Rocky' is an incredibly human story, and 'Creed' is very inspired by the Rocky lore, but there's something kind of profound in letting it all go. This is the first time I'm co-writing, and I'm learning as I go. This process is so different from 'Fru...
I tell writers to keep reading, reading, reading. Read widely and deeply. And I tell them not to give up even after getting rejection letters. And only write what you love.
The sensation of writing a book is the sensation of spinning, blinded by love and daring. It is the sensation of a stunt pilot's turning barrel rolls, or an inchworm's blind rearing from a stem in search of a route. At its worst, it feels like alliga...
I'm drawn to almost any piece of writing with the words 'divine love' and 'impeachment' in the first sentence. But I know the word 'divine' makes many progressive people run screaming for their cute little lives, and so one hesitates to use it.
I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'
I love puppies, and I love animals in general. Besides that, I do martial arts: extreme martial arts. I also play real guitar and drums, and sing. And I'm taking some college classes, hoping to major in English and creative writing.
