I often think that the prime directive for me as a teacher of writing is akin to that for a physician, which is this: do no harm.
The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.
Public disapproval is the price I pay for writing about the royals.
Beyond any role that I ever had, really early on as a stand-up, I would see actors decide to try it and they would bomb miserably. What I realized was that stand-up, acting and writing are all their own disciplines.
I find it both fascinating and disconcerting when I discover yet another person who believes that writing can't be taught. Frankly, I don't understand this point of view.
I have never started a poem yet whose end I knew. Writing a poem is discovering.
If things are going well, if the writing's coming along, I jump out of bed happy. And if the previous day has been bad, I get out of bed disgruntled.
It seems disingenuous to ask a writer why she, or he, is writing about a violent subject when the world and history are filled with violence.
I really disliked Philadelphia society - really, deeply disliked it. I spent a lot of my teenage years writing poetry attacking it.
As a piece of literacy criticism, Freud's best writing is about Dostoyevsky. It's a kind of displaced literacy criticism.
Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method. Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
I'm not writing a Ph.D. Dissertation.
I started out when I was 29 - too young to write novels. I was broke. I was on unemployment insurance. I was supposed to be writing a Ph.D. dissertation, so I had a typewriter and a lot of paper.
I am a woman, and I am a Latina. Those are the things that make my writing distinctive. Those are the things that give my writing power.
This motion-picture muddle had distracted me from my writing.
I can't tell you how many times I've been writing an article only to get distracted by an email notification, either on my laptop or smartphone.
I've tried writing with music on, but I find it distracting.
95% of the album is my writing, by choice, because it seems to be what the distributors want.
Words are so often used in the opposite sense, as a screen of diversion. It's the struggle towards truthfulness which is the same whether one is writing a poem, a novel or an argument.
I had to make a living, so I got happily diverted into writing about expeditions and adventures.
