As a writer, I always tend to take the liberty and the great artistic luxury of a composite form of writing.
Margot Livesey, my dear friend, reads all the drafts of what I write, and I read hers. We have an intense working relationship. I've been really lucky to know her. She's a great reader and teacher as well as an astonishingly good writer.
Most of my success, I feel, comes from being a good editor as opposed to a great writer.
The best thing anyone can do is be himself. Everyone was made different by God, and that's the way it should be. And if I were a writer or an announcer starting out, I don't think I'd imitate anybody. I'd try to be whatever I am.
I started writing in the '90s, so I was free to just have an eccentric career and not conform to some idea of what a black writer has to do. I didn't have the burden of representation.
Well, I'm a slow writer. For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I'd love to be more efficient, but I am not.
Someone once said that to make a regular person laugh, you need to dress a guy up like an old lady and push him down the stairs. To make a comedy writer laugh, you have to push a real old lady down the stairs. I don't know who that's attributed to. I think it's Aristophanes. Or Catherine the Great.
The only book in our home was the Bible. My parents forbade books. They thought I needed help because I wanted to be a writer!
I have a slightly contrarian streak as a writer, and one of the things I was interested in was how distilled could I make a life, and how I could cross what is kind of trivialized as a domestic novel with a novel of ideas, a philosophical novel.
I had no ambition to be a writer because the books I read were too good, my standards were too high.
I sometimes feel like a British writer more so than I feel like an American writer. But I think that has to do with my subjective understanding of what it means to be either of those things.
Quite often you want to tell somebody your dream, your nightmare. Well, nobody wants to hear about someone else's dream, good or bad; nobody wants to walk around with it. The writer is always tricking the reader into listening to the dream.
Writing is getting killed by too many chefs. Back in the Bogart days, it started with great scripts. You had a writer, and he wrote a script, and that was your movie. I think that's been watered down a bit lately.
Every writer secretly hopes that what he or she has written will endure.
I had no plans to be a writer. My teenaged bid for stardom was to be a pop star... which, ahem, didn't exactly work out.
The process of being a writer is much more interior than being a scientist, because science is so reactionary.
I work a lot in the summers. My family goes to Maine, where we have a little house. My wife's a writer, too, and we can write for six hours a day and then play with the kids.
I'm not a writer's writer. I'm not a craftsman. I could be, and that would be a one-book-a-year operation.
Growing up, nobody I knew even knew a writer. So it was a big adventure and something that I've wrestled with my whole life. I think it's a journey worth taking, really finding out who you are and what you do well.
The writer, the poet, the novelist, are all creators. This does not mean that they invent language; it means that they use language to create beauty, ideas, images. This is why we cannot do without them.
From age 7 on, I wanted to be a writer.
I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading - these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader.
I think you become a writer when you stop writing for yourself or your teachers and start thinking about readers.
I really just wanted to be a writer, but people tell you, 'You should have a backup career,' so I thought, 'OK, I'll act.' That was the foolishness of my vision for my life - that my backup career would be completely undependable.
I frankly couldn't imagine being a series mystery-fiction writer, churning out book after book about the same viewpoint character.
With iPhones, nobody has an excuse for writer's block. If you're at Whole Foods getting your green tea extract and you have a melody, you just drop it into your voice memo and save it for later.
I have a lot of favorite films. I tend to love the silliness of 'Bringing Up Baby.' 'Charade' is fantastic. 'His Girl Friday,' the banter in that, that alone made me want to be a writer.
The literary interview won't tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview.
You don't knock television, even if you don't always like what they make of your work. It makes all the difference between being an also-ran writer and very famous.
I love writing on trains. The joy of being a writer is it's all in your head; you don't need materials apart from the laptop. It's like taking your work home with you, so you can feel grounded in your own insane writerly realities wherever you are.
The more you live, the better writer you are.
My early life had a lot to do with my origins as a writer, but I didn't get into doing any writing at all until I was about 35 years old.
From 2001-2008, I was the host and a writer for the WB's weekly television program 'Weddings Portland Style.'
It's great being married to a writer. You live with someone who can read your work and help you.
If you appear in the 'Atlantic' or 'Harper's' or the 'New Yorker,' by God, you must be a writer, because everybody says so.
There are so many ways of posturing that people associate with being a writer. They imagine you wearing a beret and drinking only red wine and being full of yourself, and so, for a long time, the way I felt about writing was too private. I felt it too important and didn't want to be teased about it. So I lied about it.
