I think that you just understand, as any creative person, that there's a beast that you have to beat, and it never goes away. I've resigned myself to that, and it's kind of what keeps you going. Writing is the worst and the best.
Homer Collyer's chosen form of self-expression is the piano, although late in life, when his hearing also goes, he takes to writing.
I made my personal discovery of Emily Carr while visiting Victoria in 1981 to write a travel article. Immediately, her strong colors attracted me; her spunk fascinated me. Her down-to-earth voice in her writing appealed to me as authentic and original.
When you're writing, you think: How does intimacy happen in the work? You don't know who your reader is, woman, man, child, black person, Asian, who knows?
When I first came over to the States, I started writing, I think, as a way to help myself learn English. I would start stapling together little booklets for myself.
If you are a serious writer or just a normal one, in one way or another, you are writing in the service of freedom. All writers know, understand, or dream that their work will be in the service of freedom.
My dad and I compete on the pool table; that's the most important competition of our lives. The fact that I'm writing and it works for me is one of the great joys for him. We talk about writing, and it's great.
People that have known me for a while tell me how they see me grown as an artist and as a writer. I think that this comes with continuing writing each day. I try to write as often as I can and explore more while I do it. I feel more comfortable with opening up and telling more of my story to everyone.
I think, when I'm 73, I'm going to be getting softer, writing Hallmark cards, losing my teeth.
Diana Wynne Jones' excellent book 'The Tough Guide to Fantasyland' is a compendium of the sort of lazy writing that has given fantasy fiction - especially the sub-section that features elves and dwarves and other Tolkienesque elements - a bad name.
I think I have a God complex, and I like moving mountains and writing stories that affect entire worlds, and it's a bit hard to do that in a contemporary setting because you have reality intruding. Whereas, when you set your own reality, you can make up your own rules and do whatever you like.
The problem with literature, with writing, is that it works sometimes in terms of correction of social ills. Other times, it just does not suffice.
Historical fiction is actually good preparation for reading SF. Both the historical novelist and the science fiction writer are writing about worlds unlike our own.
I've always thought it was important not to attach too much superstition to the space where you're writing, because once you get into the mindset that you can only do it a certain way in a certain place, your creativity can get blocked.
I'll continue on the path I've been taking, feet on the ground, describing people's lives, describing people's emotions, writing from the standpoint of the ordinary people.
I think going into 'New Moon,' I knew the characters better. I knew the world better and I knew the actors who would be playing these roles. I had a sense of their rhythms and tones. 'Twilight' I was writing in a vacuum. We hadn't cast it yet.
I think writing is such a great talent, and if I was better, I would love to be a writer.
A lot of what 'Funny Girl' is about, for me, is the experience feeling very happy doing a certain thing with a certain group of people. That partly came about because of having really positive experiences writing movies.
No one looks at your hands to see how much they shake when you are interviewed to be a surgeon. The physical skills required are no greater than for writing cursive script. If an operation requires so much skill only a few surgeons can do it, you modify the operation to make it simpler.
When I am writing best, I really am lost in my world. I lose track of the outside world. I have a difficult time balancing between my real world and the artificial world.
When I go into a pitch room and I'm pitching something with a writing partner, everybody tends to look at the guy, even if I'm doing a lot of the talking.
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.
Take '39 Steps'. When I finished writing it, I counted the number of measures in the composition. I always do this because I am interested in the length of a song. So I counted this one a couple of times because 39 is an unusual number of measures for a song.
Writing poems is a chance to construct spaces that I want to imaginatively inhabit.
Well, if you're writing a thriller, you have to have your character in mortal jeopardy on page 1 or it's not a thriller.
I didn't want to spend the next thirty years writing about bad things happening in the same small town - not least of all because people would begin to wonder why anyone still lives there!
What I'm after is something different than supplying people with the idea that I'm writing an important play.
My handwriting was nothing to write home about, and I had this idea that calligraphy was like taking Latin in high school: that it was one of the bricks, the building bricks, that you had to understand about the forms of writing.
Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.
I'm quite glad I never learned to play the guitar, because I think I'd write songs that were more classically structured. As it is, I've had to create my own way of writing, which isn't typical. Everything's a big crescendo.
Back when I taught middle school and wrote adult mysteries, my students often asked me why I wasn't writing for kids. I never had a good answer for them. It took me a long time to realize they were right.
I might enjoy writing some ghost stories set in Japan because their whole idea about the spirit world is so interesting.
All good writing comes out of aloneness.
Putting words on paper regularly is part of the necessary discipline of writing. A journal is a great way to do that.
I write in a pretty straightforward way. I kind of sit down at page one and start writing.
A creative writing workshop will contain students whose ambitions and abilities, whose conceptions of literature itself, are so diverse that what they have in common - the desire to write - could almost be considered meaningless.
