I was very protective of my privacy. I didn't want people to write bad things about me that weren't true, because that's just not fair. Fifty percent of everything written about me is wrong.
I don't really think about genre. I like to write books that I'd love to read myself.
If we tried to write about politics, you'd realize that we're all a bunch of idiots.
I realize now I could have gotten a whole book out of that and so I think that was a big mistake. But the truth is you write in the moment and with your head down and there is no way back then that I could have conceived of Harry having the longevity that he has had.
So, I was always frustrated having to write and having to cut things. Why should you have to cut anything?
I've been writing joke songs since I was a kid and it served me well at S.N.L. I can write those in my sleep. In fact, I have.
I know a lot about words. I get paid to write stories, so I get to talk with people about the meaning behind words all day.
I went to Afghanistan in '96 to write about terrorist training camps south of Jalalabad and Tora Bora, in the mountains. I was there right before the Taliban took over, literally a few weeks before they took Kabul. The frontline wasn't terribly active, but it was definitely there. And they swept into power.
It is difficult not to write satire.
What ultimately happened is that my country had a war. I think it would be extraordinary, as a writer, not to want to write about that.
I don't look at emails, Internet or newspapers before 1 P.M. I wake at 7 A.M., eat fruit, drink tea or coffee, and read what I've achieved, or not achieved, the previous day. Then I take a shower and work on my next sentence until 1 P.M. After I've done emails and so on, I write again from 3 P.M. until 8 P.M.; then I socialise.
My seventeen years of teaching inform my sense of audience in every line I write.
Whenever I have had to write fiction, I've always had to invent a character who roughly has my background.
One of the surprising things I hadn't expected when I decided to write crime fiction is how much you are expected to be out in front of the public. Some writers aren't comfortable with that. I don't have a problem with that.
I did a series in Britain years ago called 'Skins,' and I remember my little sister telling me that I had a Wikipedia page that was talking about me. But then it got deleted because on Wikipedia anyone can write stuff, right? So I think that it got sabotaged. But this is years ago, so it got taken down. I don't think it exists anymore.
If I had stayed purely a horror writer or thriller writer, I might have more of a presence in those particular genres, and I'd certainly have more individual titles to market, since it's much easier to write pure genre fiction than it is to create something different.
I didn't need to write historical epics, no, or science fiction, though I read a lot of science fiction as a kid and rather liked it. But I didn't have the mentality.
Look at what's happening in this world. Every day there's something exciting or disturbing to write about. With all that's going on, how could I stop?
To try to write a grand cosmical drama leads necessarily to myth. To try to let knowledge substitute ignorance in increasingly larger regions of space and time is science.
There are lots of things that happen to me that I don't write about.
I try to write about the stuff that torments us all.
You can't always write a chord ugly enough to say what you want to say, so sometimes you have to rely on a giraffe filled with whipped cream.
It's wonderful to be able to sit down and write a play.
Alan Turing is so important to me and to the world, and his story is so important to be told, so it was a big thing to take up, and I was a little petrified. Like, who am I to write the Alan Turing story? He's one of the great geniuses of the 20th century - who was horribly persecuted for being gay - and I'm a kid from Chicago.
I knew that if I wrote a new book every six months or every year, if I continued to read great books, eventually I would write something worthy of publication. I understood I might be in my forties or my fifties or even my sixties, but I felt confident that it would happen.
When you write a two thousand page history of the Second World War, the deportations and the concentration camps will take up five pages, and the gas chambers perhaps 20 lines.
Find the story you want to tell. If you don't want to write it, find somebody to write it.
People do write books.
It's still unacceptable for women to have negative emotions, especially anger, and I was trying to write against that.
The Constitution of the United States... specifically states the Congress shall write legislation for immigration policy in the United States.
I was never born to write. I was taught to write. And I am still being taught to write.
Some things that I write, you'll see a page with cartoon pictures or a drawing of a car - like a Ford - or a flag. I still do it on an occasion when a word is strange to me.
It's very common for people to recommend something to me because they're going on what I've already written, when, what really is the case, is that you want to write about something you haven't written about, in ways that you haven't done before.
I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.
It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared - as it always should be.
I write the kind of stuff I'd like to watch.
