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.
Agatha Christie's writing is incredibly skillful because her books are incredibly intellectually puzzling and challenging.
My greatest qualification for writing fiction was my ability to lie with a straight face as a child.
I love how easy it is to run my business, Writing Workshops Los Angeles, with the help of email and my website. I love that I don't have to use cuneiform, a quill, or a typewriter to write my novels - I love to write on my laptop!
A ratio of failures is built into the process of writing. The wastebasket has evolved for a reason.
In my writing, I try to combine all my favorite elements of journalism - accuracy, real characters that exist on this planet - with all my favorite elements of literature: a sense of flow, of propulsion, of wanting to read every sentence.
You just have to make sure you're writing about something that's true. It has to be honest and it has to have a real emotion behind it, regardless of where it's coming from.
I love writing but it's a real pain. It's a miserable process - very satisfying but very miserable.
Writing scripts is a laborious job that can be a real pain.
I used to have a real passion for writing, but not so much anymore - probably because I do too much of it.
The real pleasure in writing this, for me, was discovering how little you need.
My career means, if you're a non-Indian writing about Indians, at least there's one Indian in your rearview mirror.
Encourage aspiring writers to continue writing when things are going against them, when it feels hard. Explain the typical obstacles that occur, and encourage and reassure them to continue, never to give up.
I write - so it would seem - to recapture, to preserve and return to the past, though I might just as easily be writing to forget and put that past behind me.
After all these years of cooking and writing recipes, I am still amazed every time I notice how even the minutest of variation in technique can make a spectacular difference.
I've never stopped writing, never stopped recording.
There's something about taking emotional and career and relationship humiliations, writing them, acting them out again, but then redeeming them in some way.
When you're writing in big block paragraphs, you can afford to have a redundant sentence now and then, but the Twitter format requires concision.
I write plays because writing dialogue is the only respectable way of contradicting yourself. I put a position, rebut it, refute the rebuttal, and rebut the refutation.
I like myself better when I'm writing regularly.
