It's true of so many fiction writers that I much prefer the essayistic work they did, whether it's David Foster Wallace's, or John Cheever's, or Nathaniel Hawthorne's.
Too many writers get into that gross-'em-out factor.
Certain writers have it very precise and there's not much room to add something.
He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary
I write weird stories. I don't know why I like weirdness so much ... But when I write, I write weird. That's very strange. When I'm getting more and more serious, I'm getting more and more weird.
I'm the sort of writer who likes to leave doors open for readers.
Well, in features, and in writing especially, it's often the style of the writer comes in.
There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.
You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.
I think Amy Sherman-Palladino has a very specific voice; it's unlike anyone else on television.
I'm not one of those people that has to share personal experiences. That's not really the kind of writer I am. I'm a very private person to begin with.
The more learned a writer, the more digression beckons him.
I love taking a character and raining holy hell down on them and seeing how they respond, how they react. It's one of the things I do in almost all my books - my protagonist is put through a very stressful situation that tests their strength and their psychological acuity. That's one of the core components of who I am as a writer.
My preferred style is to write in first person, so I always have to play around with possible narrator voices until I find something that works.
I write slowly.
I can be accused of being acerbic as a critic and writer.
It's hard to imagine anyone accusing Lionel Shriver of being a timid writer.
With some writers, the script looks beautiful on the page, but nobody actually speaks like that.
I am a very personal writer. I write direct to the reader. I don't hold back.
Every creator sets up their world differently. That's what's so amazing about someone like Aaron Sorkin and his writing.
I don't think Donald Barthelme would have minded being called a confusing writer. Confusion was a favorite subject for him in his essays and reviews, and it's enacted in his fiction in a mishmash of dizzying incongruities.
A volume of stories, bereft of continuity in plot and character, is often unified only by the writer's obsessiveness.
I don't think you can write according to a set of rules and laws; every writer is so different.
I always squirm when I read what's called 'creative nonfiction,' and the writer is lobbing gobs of emotion and language at the world, hoping some of it will stick.
I'm the least-experimental writer. The idea of trying things just for the sake of pushing the envelope, that's never really interested me.
