I'm not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn't write them today because of my religion.
Once you are a proper, serious law-maker, you can't break the laws you're writing.
I have brothers and was a tomboy, if that's still a designation. It wasn't a stretch for me to think and write as a 13-year-old boy - it is freeing.
I spend most of my time writing.
Don't write the book you think publishers want to commission. Plenty of other writers will be doing the same thing.
The novel can't compete with cars, the movies, television, and liquor. A guy who's had a good feed and tanked up on good wine gives his old lady a kiss after supper and his day is over. Finished.
I guess what led to me writing 'Holes' was having moved to Texas in 1991, and it was sort of my reaction to Texas.
I write in the mornings, two or three hours every day, and then at least four times a week I play in a duplicate game at a bridge club. I try to go to tournaments three, four, or five times a year.
When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.
I'm not one of the people who has a kind of scholarly hat and writes in a certain way for an academic audience and then puts on a public intellectual hat and writes a different way for a different kind of readership. I generally write the way I write, no matter what and it seems to have worked for me.
If you write for the New Yorker, you always get people critiquing your grammar, you can count on it. So, because a lot of New Yorker readers are kind of, you know, amateur grammarians and so you do get a lot of that.
For the kind of places I've written for and the kind of writing that I've done, the general way to think about your audience is to think about somebody who's like yourself, but in a completely different discipline.
One of the oddities about responses that you get to what you write, if you get a fair number of them, is that people have very different ideas of what you said.
One must never judge the writer by the man; but one may fairly judge the man by the writer.
A lot of TV is put together by teams, by writing staffs and several different directors. It's a great, very smart way to make television. It's worked for however long TV's been around.
I wish I could [keep a journal]. I have a lot of journals with one page half written in. I sometimes will write myself a quick email on my Blackberry when I think of something.
I could never sit down and write jokes.
Sometimes I just want to tell a story regardless of whether it fits what the show is saying. I’ve been in a lot of writing rooms where somebody says an idea and everyone’s dying, like laughing so they’re delirious. It’s like a black hole in a good way, everything starts to fall into it, you know what I mean.
There’s a need to perfect things in a writers’ room, and that can take a lot of fun out of a show sometimes. It’s a struggle. It depends on your personality. Some people love working with a writing staff. I had a great writing staff on Lucky Louie, but it sometimes felt like Congress or something.
Breaking records is not something you expect to be doing. That's like a sports thing, it's not usually a comedy and writing thing.
If you have something to say, here's what you do: You write it down on a piece of paper, you go out in the lobby, and then you go home and you kill yourself.
I think I am less self-assured when I write English than I would be if I were writing in my first language. I have to test each sentence over and over to be sure that it's right, that I haven't introduced some element that isn't English.
I have no interest in writing confessions, in deliberately baring myself to my readers. I prefer to remain behind a screen.
I don't particularly care about having [my characters] talk realistically, that doesn't mean very much to me. Actually, a lot of people speak more articulately than some critics think, but before the 20th century it really didn't occur to many writers that their language had to be the language of everyday speech. When Wordsworth first considered that in poetry, it was considered very much of a shocker. And although I'm delighted to have things in ordinary speech, it's not what I'm trying to perform myself at all: I want my characters to get their ideas across, and I want them to be articulate.
I don't know enough about the lower classes to write about them. I don't feel with them, and that could be regarded as a defect, a limitation of my imagination. I could put myself in their position, but not politically. The idea of writing a story or a book about somebody completely devoid of appreciation of anything I care about is completely foreign to me.
