Writing criticism is to writing fiction and poetry as hugging the shore is to sailing in the open sea.
I'm writing a new love story, set in eastern North Carolina. Surprise, surprise, huh?
I'm not a fan of Dr. Seuss's better-known work, but his fables leave me awe-struck. 'Ten Tall Tales' is a collection of stories where his trademark anarchy is combined with a tautness of writing that shines an affectionate yet uncompromising spotlight on some of the absurdities of human behaviour.
I love writing. I love the swirl and swing of words as they tangle with human emotions.
My writing is about connecting ways of talking to human relationships. My purpose is to show that linguistics has something to offer in understanding and improving relationships.
Writing is so humbling; there's no confidence involved.
I tried writing fiction as a little kid, but had a teacher humiliate me, so didn't write again until I was a senior in college.
I'm not one for walking the beaches humming a melody. I love the discipline of sitting in the studio, writing and listening. That is my domain.
When I'm writing a lyric, things can only get so serious before they start becoming humorous.
As I was writing 'The Shock Doctrine', I was covering the Iraq War and profiteering from the war, and I started to see these patterns repeat in the aftermath of natural disasters, like the Asian tsunami and then Hurricane Katrina.
I was married a few times, and one of my husbands was jealous of me writing.
When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.
In writing the history of a disease, every philosophical hypothesis whatsoever, that has previously occupied the mind of the author, should lie in abeyance.
I finished 'Ice Age: Continental Drift' in 2012, and I'm living in my agent's guest bedroom in Los Angeles because you don't make a ton of money writing an animated film. The movie makes a billion dollars, and you make 'twelve cents.'
When I wrote 'The West Wing,' the juice behind it was that in popular culture, our leaders in government are generally portrayed as Machiavellian, or as idiots. I thought, well, how about writing about a group of hyper-competent people?
When I'm writing, I'm never trying to teach anything - maybe I'm trying to illuminate.
As for critical writing about modernism, its moments of lucidity are but fulgurations illuminating the dark and incomprehensible landscape of its subject's unabashed difficulty.
Occasionally I find a travel book that is both illuminating and entertaining, where vivid writing and research replace self-indulgence and sloppy prose.
Well, everything surprises me about the writing process because illustrating comes much more naturally to me than writing does.
But when I was a little kid, I was always writing stories and illustrating little books that I would create.
