As a fiction writer, all I need is a laptop, and when I'm not teaching, I travel as much as I can, applying for every research grant and overseas gig I hear of, then trying to extend those trips as far as the stipends will go. I love to travel alone.
Limited points of view let the writer dispense - and the reader gather - information from various corners of the story. It all becomes a kind of dance, with the writer guiding the reader through the various twists and turns. The challenge is keeping readers in step, while still managing to surprise.
I am not a writer.
I often get asked how I write so much. As any writer knows, the answer is to write a lot more than you actually publish.
Great storytellers in the past would go to an unknown land and return to tell the stories they've found. Those were also journeys into their inner psyches and that's still true today. An actor, a writer, does that as if saying, 'Here's what I've discovered about myself and about the world I'm in. I would like to share this with you.'
If you are a writer, Saturday and Sunday don't mean anything.
It was Nate Monaster who encouraged me to be a writer.
People always want to identify a writer with their protagonist.
I'm a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.
The relationship between critic and writer is similar to the one between the pigeon and the statue.
If a writer doesn't generate hostility, he is dead.
If I wasn't a writer, I would probably be a watchmaker. I like putting puzzles together, and that is what a watch is, figuring out how all the gears and everything else works together. I'm patient and good at focusing on a single task.
I have accepted the fact that I don't work very quickly, that I have been rejected a lot as a writer, and that what I do is unusual, so I just have to accept the terms and that it's going to take longer. It is what it is.
I'd consider myself a flailing comedy writer.
I'm a fiction writer, and fiction is telling the lives of unreal people. But the only way you can learn to do that well is by really understanding the lives of real people.
I never learned to be a writer. I never took screenwriting courses. I never read anyone's scripts. As a writer, my only guiding principle has been to write about things that scare me, write about things that make me feel vulnerable, write about things that will expose my deepest fears, so that's how I write.
More than working toward the book's climax, I work toward the denouement. As a reader and a writer, that's where I find the real satisfaction.
The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.
There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.
The first person is a tradition I relate to and that I use; historically, it's been the voice I work in. But the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I'm referred to as a 'confessional' writer.
If you ask people if they enjoy crime novels, they'll say, 'Oh, my guilty pleasure is...' then name a really brilliant crime writer.
Charles McCarry is the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue - by the breadth of Alan Furst, by the fathom of Eric Ambler, by any measure.
There is something really horrific for any human being who feels he is being consumed by other people. I'm talking about a writer's critics, who don't address what you've written, but want to probe into your existence and magnify the trivia of your life without any sense of humor, without any sense of context.
The highest compliment one can give a writer is not to say that one wholeheartedly agrees with his observations, but that he provoked - really, forced - difficult thinking about consequential matters and internal questioning of one's own assumptions, often without quick or clear resolution.
There are so many ideas that you just come up with on a day-to-day basis when you're a writer that it's very difficult to want to go back to an old fling, so to speak.
I have written, probably, more books for children than any other writer, from story-books to plays, and can claim to know more about interesting children than most.
My screenwriting credits in my career are probably not dissimilar to some other ones in the sense that a lot of the scripts you write don't get made, and the ones that do get made are certainly - as a writer, they're not your vision.
I'm a 24-hour tweet machine, I'm a 24-hour blogger. When there's no pressure on me, I can talk and write and lecture with the best of them. But put a deadline on me and I start getting writer's block.
Although every writer dreams of getting it right on the first pass, very few succeed.
There's this idea of bankers retiring and painting watercolours. You can't dabble in art - it's a life. Being a writer, an artist... is a whole life.
I'm not the guy to ask about politics. I'm a gag writer.
I spend more time being what I am: a writer, not the visiting celebrity.
I don't think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it's enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities.
So, I guess motherhood and the threat of not being able to pay my rent inspired me to be a novelist. But as far as what inspired me to be a writer, it's the stories. It sounds very cliched, but the stories rise up and demand to be told. They always have done, long before I became a writer.
I'm still very blunt: If you want to be a writer, get a day job. The fact that I have actually been able to make a living at it is astonishing.
As a writer myself, my job has very often been to also write on the job. So you get the script and a vague idea of how the scene might work, and you then add funny words or change the script. I'm not the world's best writer or the world's best actor, but I can do that thing where I can fix - or ruin - fix-slash-ruin, add quirk, add value.
