I don't work on my Sabbath. I write five-and-a-half or six days a week.
I've been writing since I'm five years old. I've been writing books since high school - junior high, high school. I write every single day. I never thought I'd be published.
I think it's hard to have a full-time job and write fiction, but for essays, you need to be in the world.
When I write books, I've learned not to have any expectations that I'm going to change the world.
People who want to write either do it or they don't. At last I began to say that my most important talent - or habit - was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It's amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up.
I write a thousand words a day.
It was interesting to write ad films and scripts for TV shows before I moved on to writing a feature film. That helped me grow as a writer, and I also found out how long I could sit in front of a computer and see something through.
I write every night.
There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.
When I'm writing, I never write more than four hours a day.
When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.
I write too much to ever keep everything just for myself.
Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis and Joe have been in my head. They're always there. I started these guys because I like them.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
You can't write drunk.
Writing's still the most difficult job I've ever had - but it's worth it.
I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.
I worked with several writers at the University of Michigan: Nicholas Delbanco, Peter Ho Davies, Eileen Pollack, Laura Kasischke, and Thomas Lynch, who told me the same thing over and over again: Persist. Read, write, and improve: tell your stories.
Nothing improves your writing, I think, as much as your keeping writing.
Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's the real secret of writing. Put yourself in front of the screen or the blank sheet of paper and get to work.
When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!
No matter how long my day job hours were, I always made time to write. I wrote fiction, short stories, and poetry. I never shared it with anybody.
If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.
I'm totally in control of this tiny, tiny world right there at the typewriter.
It's a fallacy that writers have to shut themselves up in their ivory towers to write. I have all these interruptions, three of which I gave birth to. If I was thrown for a loop every time I was distracted I could never get anything done.
