I write sets of books, but I've also written a lot of orphans.
Hands down, the hardest part for me is coming up with an idea. I spend about 14 months writing a book, and that's a lot of hours spent thinking about a single project. I simply have to love the idea. I'll go through dozens of workable ideas until I find the one that lights my fire.
An awful lot of thriller writers write women rather badly. So just doing it OK gets a lot of credit.
Writing is one thing and knowledge is another. Writing is the photographing of knowledge, but it is not knowledge itself. Knowledge is a light which is within man. It is the heritage of all the ancestors knew and have transmitted to us as seed, just as the mature baobab is contained in its seed.
I sort of like writing about weird characters, I guess.
A writer writes with his genius; an artist paints with hers; everyone who creates operates from this sacramental center.
If you look at the content of songs people write, it's usually about the things they know best.
The most interesting thing about writing is the way that it obliterates time. Three hours seem like three minutes.
I have my favorite cat, who is my paperweight, on my desk while I am writing.
It's a weird job because making music or writing a song is a personal thing. . . and it kind of has to be. You can always tell when people are faking.
Have fun writing, because it enhances both the writer's and reader's experience.
To have come on all this new world of writing, with time to read in a city like Paris where there was a way of living well and working, no matter how poor you were, was like having a great treasure given to you.
I believe the personal is the collective. One of the ironies of writing memoir is in using the "I" it becomes an alchemical "we. " This is the sorcery of literature.
Well I've been writing books. So that, by its nature, is kind of a solitary occupation. And from time to time I have research help, but mostly I've done those completely on my own.
I could not do what I do without the kindness, consideration, resourcefulness and work of librarians, particularly in public libraries. What started me writing history happened because of some curiosity that I had about some photographs I'd seen in the Library of Congress.
Speak up when you're supposed to, as opposed to trying to write prescriptions for the way people should live.
I always thought it was important to overdeliver, and when I got one of my first jobs, writing jokes for Garry Shandling when he was hosting the Grammys, I stayed up all night and wrote a hundred jokes, and I thought, "I'm always going to be the person that gives them more than they requested, and that's why they'll want to keep me around. "
I write a sentence a thousand times, changing it all the time to look at it in different ways.
I didn't do a masters in creative writing until I was 26, which is quite old, and then I found myself in New York and I needed money, so I started working full time as an editor.
It was a great place to write a novel about book burning, in the library basement.