Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.
Over the last 25 years, since a lot of science writing became accessible to layman, I've become quite a consumer of science. As a child, I wasn't streamed into science, and I regret that now.
Headline writing is tough because often times you are given a predetermined number of spaces and words depending on the layout and the type of the story.
In the course of writing 'First Light,' I climbed all over and through the Hale Telescope, where I found rooms, stairways, tunnels, and abandoned machines leaking oil. My notebooks show tooth-marks where I gripped them with my teeth while climbing around inside the telescope, and the notebooks are stained with Flying Horse telescope oil.
I need therapy after writing. It's like leaking blood from a stone. It's brutally difficult but worth it.
It was a difficult second record. I had moments where I couldn't write; had moments where I was writing lots. It was just a massive learning process for me.
No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem.
Like many writers, I started by writing short stories. I needed to learn how to write and stories are the most practical way to do this, and less soul-destroying than working your way through a lengthy novel and then discovering it's rubbish.
Under Lenin, hardly less than under Stalin, historians harbored critical opinions at their peril. The writing, let alone the publication, of political diaries was virtually impossible.
In my writing, I focus lenses. I'm almost always seeing when I am writing.
I think all writing is necessarily autobiographical to a greater or lesser extent, and the less it tries to be confessional, the more likely it is that you're somehow sneaking the things you need to say in there.
Writing is a form of licensed madness.
I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.
Writing and cafes are strongly linked in my brain.
Indeed, 'The Second Plane' is such a weak, risible, and often objectionable volume that the reader finishes it convinced that Mr. Amis should stick to writing fiction and literary criticism, as he's thoroughly discredited himself with these essays as any sort of political or social commentator.
Jacques Derrida is a very important thinker and philosopher who has made serious contributions to both philosophy and literary criticism. Roland Barthes is the one I feel most affinity for, and Michel Foucault, well, his writing influenced my novel, 'Middlesex.'
Local markets for literary fiction remain underdeveloped; the metropolis often holds out the only real possibility of a professional writing career.
I'm very keenly aware that there aren't very many women writing literary fiction in Ireland and so that gives me a sense that what I say matters, in some small way.
One would think that in writing about literary men and matters there would be no difficulty in finding a title for one's essay, or that any embarrassment which might arise would be from excess of material. I find this, however, far from being the case.
If I was writing songs just for me I'd only play them in my living room, alone.
