Ah, typical writing day? Well, I tend to do e-mail and the business stuff of writing more in the morning while my brain wakes up and then write more in the afternoon, sometimes from about 11 until 5, or 12 until 5. If a story is driving me nuts, I'll work more in the evenings, but usually I try not to do that. That's family time.
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 was always a keen reader. I jotted down one or two things, but it never occurred to me to think of a job in writing. I thought that writers were like demi-gods. I don't know what I thought.
I always write my novels with music (I don't listened to the music seriously.) Music seems to encourage me.
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.
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 didn't write songs for a very long time.
I write every night.
It puzzles me when writers say they can't read fiction when they're writing fiction because they don't want to be influenced. I'm totally open to useful influence. I'm praying for it.
There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.
When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.
It's painful to consider anything but writing.
When I ventured into writing at the age of 17, I wanted to be a good and successful writer. I just wanted to write good stuff - poems, prose, stories, essays, everything.
My first love was reading, which inspired me to write.
I miss you so much your absence causes me, at times, accute pain. I don't mean sexually. I mean in connection with my writing.
Mainly I love working on good writing.
I write too much to ever keep everything just for myself.
If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
I used to write stories a lot because you had to fill your hours some other way than watching television. So my imagination was vivid, and I used to write a lot of stories. I wrote a novel, which I still have, which is so awful.
I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.
When I read 'Greenberg,' I had a really strong sense if I could be any kind of writer I wanted to be, I'd be this kind of writer. And I felt like, even in my experiences, what writing I had done, even on a small scale, when it was good, it shared some quality with it.
I gave up writing children's books. I wanted to escape from them as I had once wanted to escape from 'Punch': as I have always wanted to escape. In vain.
I've never managed to keep a journal longer than two weeks.
