I consider myself kind of a reporter - one who uses words that are more like music and that have a choreography. I never think of myself as a poet; I just get up and write.
Writing was something I always as a kid thought would be fabulous and glamorous to be a writer.
Writing is revision. All prose responds to work.
My first serious attempts at writing were made in 1868, and I took up two very different lines of composition; I wrote some short stories of a very flimsy type, and also a work of a much more ambitious character, 'The Lives of the Black Letter Saints.'
I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.
I never had a highfalutin' view of what I write.
When I write books, I've learned not to have any expectations that I'm going to change the world.
You know, as a writer, I'm more of a listener than a writer, cuz if I hear something I will write it down.
I'm not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they're like. They are in love with language. They're obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren't more special than anybody else's, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational.
Writing a novel isn't like building a brick wall. You don't figure out how to do it, and then it gets easier each time because you know what you're doing. With writing a novel, you have to figure it out each time. Each time you start over, you just have the language and the idea and the hope.
I don't like the word 'poetry,' and I don't like poetry readings, and I usually don't like poets. I would much prefer describing myself and what I do as: I'm kind of a curator, and I'm kind of a night-owl reporter.
For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.
I had the most incredible English and literature teachers in school, and it really influenced my love of storytelling. It's what made me excited to study journalism in college. I love editorials and documentaries. All of that came from being given the opportunity to lose myself in good writing when I was a kid.
There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.
I come from a family of writers. My mom had been a writer, nonfiction books, and her mother was a playwright in the 1930s and '40s. And my twin brother, Alexi, is a writer on 'The Following.'
I prefer writing originals.
Writing is more important than being a writer.
I have admiration for people who can do it well - the guys who wrote 'Cheers' and 'Frasier.' They created sort of a blissful comedic universe.
Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.
I have more to say as a writer than from behind a wok.
Mainly I love working on good writing.
As a writer, you're always trying to say the best thing. You're always thinking about what's the best thing to say, and what's the hardest way to say it, and what's the best line? Sometimes the best line is the simplest line. Sometimes the best line is the line that evokes more feeling than actual wordsmithing.
When you're writing, you're conjuring. It's a ritual, and you need to be brave and respectful and sometimes get out of the way of whatever it is that you're inviting into the room.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.
