Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
Little children are all writers.
Maybe we're stuck with who we are.
I just like doing it, I like writing.
Sometimes I write well when I'm very upset.
I don't have the courage not to write all the time.
I don't really like to tell people to get out drugs.
Censorship is all around us, I don't think it's innate.
You can't tell a writer they should just be more confident.
The main thing is to explain to yourself that everybody suffers.
I love it when people can help me with my work, so I do show it.
Truly things are better in general now, in America, than in the past.
The making of fiction takes literally what is suggested by our imagination.
I actually think it's sometimes easier for the control freaks to let loose.
Teaching is very important to me, and it has become more important as I get older.
We're always inventing, even if we're making someone who's fairly close to ourselves.
I think you have to remember that writing is hard; my first editor used to say that to me.
You have to write fiction that mirrors the actual world, which has people of all sorts in it.
I think people feel for a long time that they ought to know how to write a novel in two drafts.
There's the belief that we can't be smart enough to write. And certainly censorship of women, too.
Being part of a community of writers is huge. I really think that's why people go to MFA programs.
Anyone with an imagination can write about the day-to-day experiences of someone he or she is not.
In many cultures, women are sometimes literally kept from learning to read or from going to school.
Sometimes it's interesting to see what people who have too much control need to do to write freely.
I get to a certain point, and I think in a novel it's about the third draft, when I want other eyes on it.
I love to read nonfiction and memoir, but I'm mostly interested in the piece of writing more than the person.
We still have so many cultures in which people are imprisoned and whipped and killed for writing what they think.
I don't think a white person can write accurately and convincingly about what black people experience of oppression.
I find that I get very excited about what my students are up to and that I get to be the hurdle they need to jump over.
I think that inevitably, the trouble our characters go through is a kind of metaphor for what's happening in ourselves.
Certainly children are being encouraged far more than they were seventy-five years ago and are more accepted as they are.
Writers sometimes are paid a great deal of money, but much more frequently they're not paid or are paid only a little bit.
Somehow we have to detach from feeling as though money is a quick and easy standard by which we can gauge how well we're doing.
When an editor first explained to me the difference between direct and indirect writing, I just thought it was a stylistic choice.
We have to give our poor, innocent, and undeserving-of-our-badness characters trouble in order to make them characters in a story.
It's a scary thing for fiction writers, when you're always writing from the point of view both as and for someone who is different.
I think a day in your life on which nothing bad happens may be a wonderful day, but it probably isn't going to be the basis of a story.
It's hard to say which of us is luckier, the ones who go through long periods when they can't write or the ones who can write pretty easily.
There seems to be a tremendous desire among many people now to know authors and how they work, to know what's autobiographical and what isn't.
I heard a white writer say, 'Oh, I'd never put black people in my writing, I'm afraid I would offend someone by doing it wrong.' I can't bear that!
I'm very secretive. I'll write a whole novel and revise it, which might take me two years or more, and the people I know best don't know what I'm writing about.
Inevitably we start by thinking that if our work is any good, we'll get money. It's as we would if you started up a business or if you work in another profession.
There is a lot of censorship about writing that's exerted from all directions, from families or governments and society, even the fear of being offensive in some way.
Whoever would write books? It's suffering as well as greatly satisfying. And certainly there's suffering in the sense that you don't know for a long time how to do it.
There are so many different ways, most of them helpful and legal, to get yourself into a state of mind where writing is possible. It's going to be different for each person.
Telling someone to be confident in the abstract is not going to make it easier for the unconfident writer to actually get herself or himself to the point of being able to put in the upsetting stuff.
I think the difference between writing as someone and writing for them is that when you write for someone, you take on a kind of political burden or message, which I don't think we have the right to do.
I've been astonished how often, when I convince a writer to tell a story more straightforwardly and to tell it more simply and directly, it turns out that this author is great and the story is wonderful.
We have to diversify, we have to find work we can do that helps other people while helping ourselves, work that has to do with writing that isn't necessarily just writing saleable novels or getting huge advances.
I think we need to develop the courage to write from the viewpoint of people who may seem quite different from ourselves, who might have a different sexual orientation or a different race or a different ethnicity.
Sometimes people want to know how to write a story from the point of view of a murderer and make her sympathetic. I think the answer is that you start by having her look for her car keys, because everybody knows what it's like.