If you are a serious writer or just a normal one, in one way or another, you are writing in the service of freedom. All writers know, understand, or dream that their work will be in the service of freedom.
It's just difficult to see that people want to be like the actors and the performers and the politicians who are - who they see all the time, but the people that are probably having the most fun are the writers and the directors and the producers and the scientists, right, the people in the back that are getting to do the creative process.
I definitely am a performer, and there are different styles of stand-up; I mean, some people are writers and they get onstage to get jokes out, and that's definitely not what I do. I like to just go up and, if I'm telling a story about someone, I'll play his or her part.
There's a blockbuster side to Knopf, whether it's P. D. James or John le Carre or our best-selling books. We try to sell our writers as aggressively as those houses regarded as commercial with a capital C.
So many writers live their whole lives in rooms. You can be too civilised in the environment you have around you, too oriented towards speaking engagements and literary festivals and dinner parties. That has no interest for me these days. You get to a point where you don't care anymore. At that point, you can start to write.
I do have two wonderful awards from the Western Writers of America, one for 'Beardance' and the other for 'Far North.' The award is called the Spur, and the plaques really do have spurs on them!
Gabriel Garcia Marquez is one of my all-time favorite writers. I feel spiritual when reading his words, even though they're translated. I wish desperately that I could read it in its original language. I already feel like I'm going to church when I read him; imagine if I could read it in the original.
I don't think I'm any competition to the already-existing canon of writers in Kannada. How can I ever even think of comparing myself?
I think we need to radically reimagine the future - citizens, artist, writers, politicians, everyone.
Most writers can tell stories of how their books failed to be made into films.
Novels by British writers are among my favorites because our family has enjoyed travel in England and because they are written with an economy of words as if they were written with a pen instead of a computer. Penelope Fitzgerald is a favorite.
All the sudden, I was part of the 'No Man's Land' thing, and there was a bundle of core writers for that, but somewhere along the line, I became the go-to guy after that initial arc.
Writers are two-home men - they want a place outside and a place within.
I thought I was going to be a horror story writer. My influences were horror writers, like Rich Matheson, Ray Bradbury and Bram Stoker.
To create something new is both thrilling and excruciating at the same time. It's great to have all these choices in front of you, and to have the writers in the room so you know exactly what they meant. But the downside is you want so badly not to screw it up!
It seems like the darker the books are, the nicer the person is. People say it's the romance writers you've got to watch out for.
We haven't had crime writers, and for a long time in the Republic, we didn't seem to have a crime problem as such.
Whenever there's an opportunity to celebrate the written word and celebrate the folks that read the written word, and, I think, to encourage other writers to write and encourage folks to read more and get connected to it in a personal way, it's a positive thing.
Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.
Writers always say, 'I always knew I wanted to be a writer; when I was a three-month-old foetus a pen formed in my hand and I began to scratch my first story on the inside of my mother's womb.' I started later, in my early twenties.
It's what all writers dream of, that our work finds a measure of immortality that long outlives the words of any critic.
I like terrific writing, but I also like a terrific story. My favorite books have both, and they're by contemporary, commercial American writers.
I was aware that there is an expectation that writers inevitably falter at this stage, that they fail to live up to the promise of their first successful book, that the next book never pleases the way the prior one did. It simply increased my sense of being challenged.
I've often felt like an outsider, not necessarily because I'm Korean, an immigrant, or female. I think writers are odd people.
Increasingly, there are those of us who write from outside the center, and those are the writers that I'm most interested in because they bring me into worlds that I did not previously know. And that, as a writer, is what I try to create.
The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is to write the book that you would want to read, and hope other people agree.
Writers and intellectuals have a duty to humanity. It is to insist that the human entity remains the primary asset in overall development; thus, it must be safeguarded.
I think that if writers don't speak about real life, it's because they don't know it.
I was a Marvel kid, and I would have to say that Spiderman is my all-time favorite character. As I got older, my tastes developed a little bit more, and I would follow certain writers; like, I really got into Grant Morrison. From the time I was 5, I was into comic books. From the time I learned how to read, it was all about comic books.
Writers are often alone when they work. Hours pass in silence as one long moment; light fades as day turns back to face the coming night.
Delaying and withholding tactics, red herrings, partial and doubtful outcomes are stock in trade for fiction writers, especially crime writers.
There are a lot of people of my generation in New Zealand literature, young writers on their first or second books, that I'm just really excited about. There seems to be a big gap between the generation above and us; it seems to be quite radically different in terms of form and approach.
There's not that many people from the sixties who have progressed as writers and are continuing on. They're out there. But I'm one of them who's just continued on, following his own little inner madness.
I think everything we do, on one level or another, as writers, most of our writing is informed by our world view. It's informed by our own understanding of spirituality; things that matter, things that are important to us. I write about things that matter for me.
There are now 30-year-old Mexican writers who do great novels in which Mexico isn't even mentioned.
I've always seen it as the role of an artist to drag his inside out, give the audience all you've got. Writers, actors, singers, all good artists do the same. It isn't supposed to be easy.
