I may be writing well, I may be writing poorly, but I enjoy the act of writing and sometimes when it turns out okay, I feel an elation that is incomparable.
I thought I'd write one book and the world would change overnight
Today, there are more opportunities for writers in terms of access to larger success, but it's more difficult to publish a literary novel in the lower ranges. In other words, you almost have to hit a home run. You can hit a triple, maybe, but nobody's interested in a single.
The best thing about being a best-selling writer is being a best-selling writer. More seriously, today I can write full time and pay the bills.
Write for the love of your art. Someplace down the road, the money, the fame, they'll come, but by that time you won't be thinking in terms of money or fame.
writing is like being in love. You never get better at it or learn more about it. The day you think you do is the day you lose it. Robert Frost called his work a lover's quarrel with the world. It's ongoing. It has neither a beginning nor an end. You don't have to worry about learning things. The fire of one's art burns all the impurities from the vessel that contains it.
You do it a day at a time. You just put your rejection slips in a shoebox and tell yourself one day you're going to autograph them and sell them at auction.
Maybe I'm perverse, but the question of "rooting" for a character, or setting out to write a character for whom other people will root, has never had anything to do with why I read or write fiction. As long as the writing and story remain alive, intense, invigorating, provoking, the characters can be as demonic or saintly as the author wants.
The chief difference between good writing and better writing may be measured by the number of imperceptible hesitations the reader experiences as he goes along.
I play and I've played in heavy bands, but when I write for myself, I don't particularly feel like writing huge rock riffs. It just doesn't work for me and my voice.
I hate violence, and I didn't plan to write horror; it just poured out of me.
Actors do want to work with me and I'm very grateful for that, but you never know. I could write parts for them that they don't want to play and then all of the sudden they don't want to work with you that much.
You should just write the movie based on people you actually know and then just see who wants to play it. Cast the net.
In general, markets know more than the people who write about them.
Because in fact I only lived to write, see no sense in life, have only forced "interests," wish every night, not urgently but quite definitely I could just not wake up tomorrow.
Writing comes into being to retain information across time and across space. Before writing, communication is evanescent and local; sounds carry a few yards and fade to oblivion. The evanescence of the spoken word went without saying. So fleeting was speech that the rare phenomenon of the echo, a sound heard once and then again, seemed a sort of magic.
I just think its the changes that age brings. You slow down a little bit ... the writers are smart enough to write all those changes that life gives you.
If I knew how to write a poem, I wouldn't.
I try to write books that are different from the books I've already written. I think one of the thing I really try to do is reinvent how a novel can be written.
I think, living in America, we're so bombarded with God all the time that in certain ways I'm making statements against that bombardment, you know? I think it's crazy. I mean, I don't believe in God. I don't believe in anything. But I still think about it. And I still write about it.
I don't write with an outline. I don't often know what I'm going to do as I'm writing. And I do everything by feel and by instinct.
I try to make the voice in my head come out onto the page. I try to make it much more conversational than other writing. I speak everything, so if something sounds right I write it. It's more about sound and the rhythm of speech than written language.
Writing's not precious to me. It's not a thing that requires specific environment. You know, it's my job. Just like anybody with a job, you have to do your job when you don't feel like it, regardless of how good or bad the conditions are, regardless of how good or bad you might feel on any particular day.
I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.
I always wanted to write a book about LA, a big ambitious book. Nobody had ever really done it with LA- treating the city seriously as a major economic and cultural power, as the embodiment of 21st century America.
