Freedom is the basic prerequisite for writing.
I do not believe writers should read reviews of their own books, and I do not. If one is not careful one is soon writing to please reviewers and not their audience or themselves.
Within reason, I can write what I like and spend as long doing it as is necessary. That is a luxury beyond price.
The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you anyway.
Depending on what happens with my directing career, I don't think I'll stop writing, even if I crash and burn in movies and TV. I'll go back to plays. Even if I crash and burn there, I'll write a novel. That's the great thing about writing is that you don't have to wait for people to give you permission to do it.
I cannot imagine any writer who would not fight for his peace and quiet.
I love my editor, but that would be the definition of hell to me to live with someone and have them go page by page through my manuscript. That I want to avoid at all costs.
At the evident risk of seeming ridiculous, I want to begin by saying that I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously. I hope this isn't too melodramatic or self-centred a way of saying that I attempt to write as if I did not care what reviewers said, what peers thought, or what prevailing opinions may be.
I think fiction writers should work. If you have a job and are not living off advances or grants, you never have to make concessions in your writing, ever.
What's the challenge in writing a novel that few people will read? I'm more than happy writing what I do and have no plans to change that.
I don't understand why one should be one thing or the other. Writing, to me, is writing is writing. It should be a flexible tool. Whatever skills I have, have to work for me; I won't be dictated by them.
I write wherever I am. It helps that the writing process, for me, is a lone-wolf mission.
Don't try to anticipate an ideal reader - or any reader. He/she might exist - but is reading someone else.
The great thing about being a novelist is that you organize your own day.
I've never really felt comfortable co-writing. I usually go at my own speed, you know.
I think if I was interested in writing on my own, I would be a novelist - then you could write about yourself, and that would be it. You wouldn't need anyone else.
When young writers approach me for advice, I remind them, as gently as I can, that they are on their own, with no help available anywhere. Which is how it should be.
I worry that people think you have to go to a university to be a good writer, which is categorically untrue. I don't think I learned how to write at Oxford. I did not go to any creative writing classes or anything.
I learned a long time ago that not becoming friendly with the people you write about is a way to maintain your freedom to say whatever you damn well please.
If you love a young writer, maybe the best thing you can do is give them a little bit of space.
There are too many "creative writing" courses and seminars, in which young wirters are constantly being taught to rewrite the previous generation. They should be experimenting on their own. Every writer faces different problems which he must solve for himself.
If I'm writing a book, and I'm warned, 'Oh, this is unsaleable, you need to make it shorter,' or, 'It has to be this, or that,' I'm proud to say I don't pay attention.
There's a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him - or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn't have anything to do with his ego or his desire to 'be a good writer.'
That's what I love about writing is you don't need anyone's permission to do it. You can just get up in the morning, grab a pad and pen and start writing.
Virginia Woolf was wrong. You do not need a room of your own to write.
