Don't we all write about love? When men do it, it's a political comment. When women do it, it's just a love story.
I’d do anything on earth to become a really great writer. That’s as sincere a thing as I’ve ever said.
A writer’s job is courage. You’ve got to be as honest as you can.
There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.
The wish to become a writer is simply egoism: the desire to become a puppet master and thus separate oneself from other puppets.
Writing is a lonely job.
You’re not really alone when you are writing and anyway there has always been a sense of someone else.
I write about people who do extraordinary things. It just turned out it was called science fiction.
Every great or even very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications ... It is his world and no other.
It is only through the confining act of writing that the immensity of the nonwritten becomes legible.
What I have most wanted to do throughout the past ten years is to make political writing into an art.
The only way you can write the truth is to assume that what you set down will never be read.
It is possible for a writer to make, or remake at least, for a reader, the primary pleasures of eating, of drinking, or looking on, or sex.
That is the mystery about writing, it comes out of afflictions, out of the gouged times when the heart is cut open.
People from different parts of the world can respond to the same story if it says something to them about their own history and their own experience.
I would be so lonely on earth if I didn’t have the possibility and freedom to write. I will go to my grave changing a word. And there is always the absolutely right word.
Writing has always been a serious business for me. I felt it was a moral obligation. A major concern of the time was the absence of the African voice.
Even when I finish a book, I’m never sure whether it is good or rubbish.
You know, it's a truism that writers for children must still be children themselves, deep down, must still feel childish feelings, and a child's surprise at the world.
I liked to watch the fights. Somehow it reminded me of writing. You needed the same thing, talent, guts and condition.
It’s assumed that in order to be a serious writer, you have to look like the back of a bus.
Every writer thinks he’s a good one.
Writing is the product of a deeply disturbed psyche, and by no means therapeutic.
That’s the job of the writer. Holding that mirror up to people. We’re not merely decorative, pleasant and safe.
Whether a novel is autobiographical or not does not matter. What is important is the truth in it and the way that truth is expressed.