Writing Quotes
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I have been very afraid of writing about other cultures and countries. I've been worried about getting the research wrong. I ask a lot of questions. I try to visit the area. If I'm not able to do that, I search out people from that country who live elsewhere and ask questions.
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My goal is to write stories that are connected, but not sequels in any meaningful sense. Like Howard's Conan tales or Leiber's Fahrrd & the Great Mauser stories.
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While I was in high school, I discovered and began writing science fiction.
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Writing, printing, and the Internet give a false sense of security about the permanence of culture.
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Good writing is everything.
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Footnotes -- little dogs yapping at the heels of the text
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All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.
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One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.
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There's a difference between doing memoir and writing a novel. If I had put the story of the boy killing my dog - and that was Eric also, what a little monster he was! - in a novel, even if I took it directly from life, it would be fiction.
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In my ideal writing environment, I'd be surrounded by nice visual art in a room with a window and high ceilings. The window would have to give me natural light.
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The idea that you waited for that particular issue to come out, but then you planned your TV viewing for the coming season, it was a completely different world. And I grew up in Fort Lauderdale, so there was a TV critic writing for the Miami Herald, Jack Anderson, that was very influential. Just to read, every morning, somebody who cared about TV as much as I did - they were an adult, and they were clearly being paid for it. That was an "a ha!" moment for me before I was even 10.
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I think of writing as a sculptural medium. You are not building things. You are removing things, chipping away at language to reveal a living form.
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I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too.
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No book includes the entire world. It's limited. And so it doesn't seem like an aesthetic compromise to have to do that. There's so much other material to write about.
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Well, language seems to be something that obsesses me. I'm always writing about it.
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The bottom line is I'm writing to save the dead. I'm writing to save the people I have lost, some of whose bodies are still walking around.
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It's painful to consider anything but writing.
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My work is more driven by the creative word. It's immersed in other writing and printed work, rather than drawn so much from life or past experience.
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People think writing a children's book is something you could do in an afternoon but it's actually really hard.
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What I ended up doing was kind of crafting an idea for a story, presenting it to a writer - a dear friend of mine, Brad Mirman - and he ended up writing a beautiful script. I should've done that a lot earlier.
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I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing.
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Teasing out the way the world might look through another's eyes is what makes the creative process so fascinating and enjoyable.
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I started writing it the day after Sept. 11. I was living in New York City. We didn't have any phone service and we didn't have any mail. Like a lot of writers do, I started to write in a voice that I missed.
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There are so many ready to write (poor fools!) for the honor and glory of the thing, and there are so many ready to take advantage of this fact, and withhold from needy talent the moral right to a deserved remuneration.
