Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.
My literary heroes all wrote about L.A.: Joseph Wambaugh, Ross Macdonald, and Raymond Chandler were the three writers that made me want to be a writer.
I think TV is much more the writer's medium and film is about the director and their vision and how you can collaborate with them and see that through to the end. They are so different.
A literary journal is intended to connect writer with reader; the role of the editor is to mediate.
Long before I was a writer, when I was just a haphazard reader and a dreamer of stories, I learnt about an influential book by Harold Bloom. 'The Anxiety of Influence', published in 1973 when I was five years old, is taken up with the terrifying influence of poets on each other.
At all times, think like a writer, and keep those antennae twitching - that way, you pick up new ideas.
I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.
When a writer knows home in his heart, his heart must remain subtly apart from it.
And you find as a writer there are certain spots on the planet where you write better than others, and I believe in that. And New Orleans is one of them.
I don't think I've had a very interesting life, and I feel that is a great liberation. That gives me great freedom as a fiction writer. Nothing that happened holds any special tyranny over me.
I could tell it was a popular move as a writer to walk down the bass lines while you were writing a song.
I think when you're working with a character that another writer is acting as - for lack of a better word - custodian of, your obligation as a professional is to not do anything that violates that 'primary' take.
I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer's block, the feeling of not being able to do these things.
As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.
But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.
The responsibility of a writer is to excavate the experience of the people who produced him.
As for the zone, I always find the zone immediately after I am sure I will never ever find the zone again because it has left me for some other, better writer.
Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.
Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.
There's many things that I am. And all of those things come together at some point. If somebody wants to limit me, you know and they'll say, 'Well, this is Walter Mosley, the mystery writer.' I don't like that. Because I do many things.
I've become a day writer: most people start as night writers, and I used to be, but something happened to my endocrine system. I do miss the 3 A.M. writing jags.
From the moment I wrote 'Leaf Storm' I realized I wanted to be a writer and that nobody could stop me and that the only thing left for me to do was to try to be the best writer in the world.
If you're a singer you lose your voice. A baseball player loses his arm. A writer gets more knowledge, and if he's good, the older he gets, the better he writes.
I was taught Shakespeare brilliantly by an eccentric genius at Harrow named Jeremy Lemmon who made me want to be a writer.
In my mind, I still think - and wish - that I'm going to be a journalist or a writer. That's been my dream job my entire life.
My idea is always to reach my generation. The wise writer writes for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.
Finding a writer who can write decent kids' dialog and finding kids that can act realistically and not 'cute' is an effort.
I've never experienced writer's block. When it's going really well, my body temperature goes up, and I'm flushed. I get quite delirious.
We've all had that experience where we hear a song that we've liked for many years, and we finally hear what the writer tells us what it's about, and you're often disappointed.
What writer wants to make compromises with story? Story is the only reason you're in it.
What one's goal should be is just to become a better writer and to tell different kinds of stories.
Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.
I am not a writer, but I have been told I write good emails.
I'm a writer; I've worked as much as a writer as I have as an actor, so I was in a script-note session at Imagine for a TV show I wrote that they were producing, and they happened to say, 'You'd be great as Crosby, do you want to do this show we're doing, 'Parenthood?'
I've always loved short stories. Even before I was a writer, I was reading short stories - there were certain writers where I just felt like they could do in a short story what so many writers needed a whole novel to do, and that was really inspiring to me.
It's a luxury being a writer, because all you ever think about is life.
