I like a lot of Margaret Atwood, I like much of Alice Munro. Again, if you were to ask me about male writers, there's often a novel I admire, but not all of their works.
My dad was an adventurer, my mother a romantic. When they met in college, both were creative writers; the writing was a bond.
Science fiction writers, I am sorry to say, really do not know anything. We can't talk about science, because our knowledge of it is limited and unofficial, and usually our fiction is dreadful.
True terror is a language and a vision. There is a deep narrative structure to terrorist acts, and they infiltrate and alter consciousness in ways that writers used to aspire to.
My advice to aspiring writers of fantasy trilogies or series is that each book needs two main plots. There's the 'big story', the over-arching grand plot of the entire series, and there is the complete-in-itself, one-book plot.
Since I was there in the very beginning, I know the history of the characters. So, I make comments about the tone and sometimes remind the writers that we've done that before.
I have great respect for children. And I have great respect for their ability as writers.
Royalties are not how most writers or musicians make their living. Musicians by and large make a living with a relationship with an audience that is economically harnessed through performance and ticket sales.
New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.
There are many more want-to-be writers out there than good editors.
We are the only school in America, drama school in America that trains actors, writers and directors side by side for three years in a master's degree program, and we want them - to expose them to everything.
Speech writers are more vulnerable to vanity than any other group of people in Washington.
I like contemporary American literature and I like biographies and I like jazz and I like baseball and I like writers who write about the human condition and sci-fi is just something that I happened into.
When the band begins to get a name for themselves, and the writers get assigned to bands, they'll hit somebody who just doesn't like that kind of music, or they love hip hop but hate guitar rock.
Writers write. Dreamers talk about it.
I want to see the writers strike because the writers, god bless them, are the only true commies we have in Hollywood.
I think it's our job as writers for Marvel Comics to continue to create those type of stories that can be mined instead of just trying to give readers exactly what they see on film.
I had a lot of bad jobs but the one big internship I had is I interned for 'SNL' when I was 21 years old and that was the joke. You intern there and you think man, I'm going to be with the writers and the great comedians. Then you're getting everybody sandwiches and then the doors close and then all the great creatives are doing the work.
If you want to be a writer, don't worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.
Pity the nation that has to silence its writers for speaking their minds.
I'm one of the lucky writers: plots come easily to me.
Even a cup of coffee tastes so much sweeter because you've come once again out of the, literally, out of the edge of death, and that's the condition I suppose that a lot of artists and writers would like to be in.
It is certain, indeed, that the sacred writers were apt to make great allowances for people with empty stomachs, and though I am well aware that the present profane ones think this very reprehensible, I venture to agree with the sacred writers.
One reason the human race has such a low opinion of itself is that it gets so much of its wisdom from writers.
I have no ghost writers. I personally write every message and every piece of published mail.
If there is a special Hell for writers it would be in the forced contemplation of their own works.
If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn.
I think a writer's job is to provoke questions. I like to think that if someone's read a book of mine, they've had - I don't know what - the literary equivalent of a shower. Something that would start them thinking in a slightly different way, perhaps. That's what I think writers are for.
I have written about some truly great writers - John Steinbeck, Robert Frost, and William Faulkner. Faulkner and Frost were the very peaks of American poetry and fiction in the 20th century.
I can list on one hand the famous science fiction writers I never met.
The writers who have the deepest influence on one are those one reads in ones more impressionable, early life, and often it is the more youthful works of those writers that leave the deepest imprint.
Intellectuals, academics, writers and poets were an important force in the early groups of volunteers. They had the means to get to Spain and were accustomed to travelling, whereas very few workers had left British shores.
I broke in with four hits, and the writers promptly declared they had seen the new Ty Cobb. It took me only a few days to correct that impression.
Russian writers enjoy almost sacred status.
Second novels are bears. As are other people's expectations for them. I think taking the time you need with the second book is key. Writers spend years and years on their first novels and then are often expected to turn out a second at warp speed, a recipe for failure.
When I was 17, I worked in a mentoring program in Harlem designed to improve the community. That's when I first gained an appreciation of the Harlem Renaissance, a time when African-Americans rose to prominence in American culture. For the first time, they were taken seriously as artists, musicians, writers, athletes, and as political thinkers.
