If one were to include one-tenth of the remarkable people one knows, in one's fiction, no one would accept it. Real life remains one's private menagerie.
Pity the cat, thinks the writer, for I live as many lives as I can imagine.
A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.
Writers really don't retire, you know. They have to be taken out and shot.
Flora was in that state where the spirit may be willing but the flesh is weak and wishes to go on holiday - and where the flesh in most cases wins hands down with a packed suitcase. It did so now. So...
Getting the first draft finished is like pushing a very dirty peanut across the floor with your nose.
Writer's a lovers quarrel - encounters breathe the quill...
He has always admired writers who each day begin a journey towards the unknown and who nevertheless spend all their time sitting in a room".
As a writer, you don't just write for the ears, you also write for the eyes.
Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here's what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: "I've shirked two p...
Give the reader what they want, just not the way they expect it.
We weave together the many skeins of our words,Into poems and stories and books,And the books are made so much more vivacious and colourful,For all the care that is woven in along with the words.
I have voices in my headI'm a slave to imaginary peopleI feel what they feelI experience what they experience I live in their world And I'm devoted to translating their storiesI'm not crazy, I'm a wri...
I write because there is a madness within me to express my thoughts in words. I write because I feel passionately about certain feelings and there is this yearning within me to express these feelings...
Over the years I've come to realize that in a broad sense I'm interested in power and politics. I'm interested in how individuals try to eke out some wiggle room within these large institutions . . ....
The first thing that distinguishes a writer is that he is most alive when alone.
...so I think writers are made and not born. But what you choose to write is buried so deeply inside it's like lodestones inside you and sooner or later you come near something that you're supposed to...
Why do writers write? Because it isn't there.
Fictional characters are made of words, not flesh; they do not have free will, they do not exercise volition. They are easily born, and as easily killed off.
It is my personal belief that writing cannot be taught.