I've been writing in some way, shape, or form for as long as I can remember.
I know the benefits of having a really great improv show are amazing because it was this one rare and fleeting thing that was incredible, but the risk just didn't appeal to me. I liked the control of sitting down and writing things.
My name became a brand, and I'd love to say that was the plan from the start. But the only plan was to keep writing books. And I've stuck to that ever since.
I'm a playwright who gets involved in movies when I'm not writing a play.
I didn't have any agenda or plan when I started writing stuff.
The biggest obstacle to professional writing is the necessity for changing a typewriter ribbon.
There are many ways to improve your writing. Here's the bad news: 1.They all require hard work. 2.There is no magic bullet.
While I'm writing, I'm also the first reader, and I want to write a book where I'm excited about what happens next.
Writing a novel is actually searching for victims. As I write I keep looking for casualties. The stories uncover the casualties.
I've been accused countless times of writing gloomy futures. But to me, the texture of my sci-fi just feels like an extrapolation of current trends.
Writing old school HTML code was never very much fun but now it's getting downright tedious for most people.
Fairness forces you - even when you're writing a piece highly critical of, say, genetically modified food, as I have done - to make sure you represent the other side as extensively and as accurately as you possibly can.
In the end, I want to spend my 60s writing bonkbusters like Jilly Cooper.
It's hard for me to just practice without writing something.
Writing isn't a job so much as a compulsion. I've been writing since I was very young because for some strange reason, I must write, and also because when I write, I feel more alive and closer to the world than when I'm not writing.
I keep writing because it is deeply pleasurable to me.
With writing, I love doing it, but there's that love-hate relationship: You're not having a good run, you've hit a wall; it's frustrating.
Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It's one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.
I think all of my writing life led up to the writing of 'The Train Driver' because it deals with my own inherited blindness and guilt and all of what being a white South African in South Africa during those apartheid years meant.
I feel as though there are things that I'm trying to do - you know, capturing truthfully some aspect of human experience - and I'm trying really hard not to be fake. And in writing, as in life, it's harder than you think.
I started writing songs at 17.
I cannot say how strongly I object to people using other people's writing as research. Research is non-fiction, especially for horror, fantasy, science fiction. Do not take your research from other people's fiction. Just don't.
I love reading poetry, and yet, at this point, the thought of writing a poem, to me, is tantamount to figuring out a trigonometry question.
One question hovers over all of us who choose to spend our lives writing: why keep doing this in a world where so many forces are aligned against us?
I write journals and would recommend journal writing to anyone who wishes to pursue a writing career. You learn a lot. You also remember a lot... and memory is important.
It was Noel Coward whose technique I envied and tried to emulate. I collected all his records and writing.
I'm usually too shy to write on planes because I assume that everyone on board is as nosy as I am and will look over my shoulder and read what I'm writing.
It's what the Pixies always said about music - they were writing songs and just trying not to be boring. That was their main motivation and it worked for them. I remember reading that and thinking that was the way to do it.
I try to transmit emotion and soul in my voice, but my true passion has always been writing. I feel more like a writer than anything else.
Writing songs, making music, and singing is important to me, and I do all three.
My preference is for really good writing, and I just really don't care where it is.
I'm not a writer. I think I can write short stories and poetry, but film writing, brilliant film writing, is a talent - you can't just do it like that.
My writing is a combination of three elements. The first is travel: not travel like a tourist, but travel as exploration. The second is reading literature on the subject. The third is reflection.
I like the busy-ness of office life. What I discovered, to my surprise, is that I love the solitary nature of writing. What happens is that you write when you're ready.
Writing anything as an expert is really poisonous to the writing process, because you lose the quality of discovery.
After I finished my first draft of 'Salvage the Bones,' I felt that I wasn't political enough. I had to be more honest about the realities of the community I was writing about.