I've heard from writers and musicians and fans that they think I'm underrated.
The average human attention span was 12 seconds in 2000 and 8 seconds in 2013. A drop of 33%. The scary part is that the attention span of a goldfish was 9 seconds, almost 13% more than us humans. That's why it's getting tougher by the day to get people to turn the page. Maybe we writers ought to try writing for goldfish!
Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.
From an artist's point of view, I always want to work with the writers I admire.
I feel as if I'm clearly part of a trend among writers who take themselves seriously - and I confess to taking myself as seriously as the next writer.
We writers, as we work our way deeper into our craft, learn to drop more and more personal clues. Like burglars who secretly wish to be caught, we leave our fingerprints on broken locks, our voiceprints in bugged rooms, our footprints in the wet concrete.
Deliver me from writers who say the way they live doesn't matter. I'm not sure a bad person can write a good book, If art doesn't make us better, then what on earth is it for.
All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.
Some writers take to drink, others take to audiences.
Anybody can direct, but there are only eleven good writers.
I have always noticed that in portraits of really great writers the mouth is always firmly closed.
All writers are the same - they forget a thousand good reviews and remember one bad one.
I hope to read a Harry Potter novel soon, to see what it's all about. I admit to being annoyed that many good light fantasy writers have had trouble getting published, in England and elsewhere, when it is obvious the readers were waiting for us all along.
I've read everything that Isaac Asimov ever wrote, for a start. I'm massively into my fantasy genre, anything by R.A. Salvatore or David Gemmell. I've read every single book those writers have written.
I'm more concerned with getting them to find and strengthen their original voice as writers rather than imposing my own subjective tastes, judgements or sensibility on the project.
Many writers are radical. I am not, because of my age and because of my terrible fear of demagogy.
Writers have told me more than once that I'm a better interview in defeat than in victory, which is a compliment I am extremely proud of.
Some major writers have a huge impact, like Ayn Rand, who to my mind is a lousy fiction writer because her writing has no compassion and virtually no humor. She has a philosophical and economical message that she is passing off as fiction, but it really isn't fiction at all.
It's well known that actors are lousy writers.
Black writers, of whatever quality, who step outside the pale of what black writers are supposed to write about, or who black writers are supposed to be, are condemned to silences in black literary circles that are as total and as destructive as any imposed by racism.
Remember Graham Green's dictum that childhood is the bank balance of the writer? I think that all writers feel alienated. Most of us go back to an alienated childhood in some way or another. I know that I do.
Mediocrity is now, as formerly, dangerous, commonly fatal, to the poet; but among even the successful writers of prose, those who rise sensibly above it are the very rarest exceptions.
But because we've all been readers, we know what the experience is like, and we hope that what certain writers have given to us, we will give to someone.
Many of the writers who have inspired me most are outside the genre: Humorists like Robert Benchley and James Thurber, screenwriters like Ben Hecht and William Goldman, and journalists/columnists like H.L. Mencken, Mike Royko and Molly Ivins.
If you're a misanthrope you stay at home. There are certain writers who really don't like other people. I'm not like that, I don't think.
White writers in many cases choose not to populate their fiction with people of color. A lot of what I'm doing is trying to write against that, not about race but against the avoidance of race that's such a dominant model in white literary discourse.
If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.
One of the questions writers bump up against in their work, whether they know it or not, is about lying. Because fiction is a form of deceit, and one's abilities are measured by how convincingly one can persuade readers that these events really happened.
It's safe to say that all poets are manic-depressives, but fiction writers are on that scale, too.
There are so many reasons why, for me, writing is superior to acting. One of them is anonymity. Writers can live relatively normal lives.
I don't think I'm a great singer myself. I'm all right. I've worked with different writers, different producers... I've just been blessed with the caliber of people I've been able to work with.
I went to a very mean school and was bullied like crazy. I was a bit of a goth with purple hair, and I was also part of the drama group, which was filled with actors and writers and wasn't really accepted by the rest of the school.
Editing is the same as quarrelling with writers - same thing exactly.
It's a bit of a crapshoot out there with young writers right now anyway.
I read, therefore I'm interested in writers.
You could name the great stars of the silent screen who were finished; the great directors gone; the great title writers who were washed up. But remember this, as long as you live: the producers didn't lose a man. They all made the switch. That's where the great talent is.
