writing Quotes

When you start writing about the stuff that is the central experience of your own life, you can talk about whatever you want, in whatever way you want.

I've never yet managed to write a novel which didn't have an Indian central character.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

I don't like books that play to the gallery, but I've become more concerned with telling a story as clearly and engagingly as I can.

As a writer, one of the things we all learned from the movies was a kind of compression that didn't exist before people were used to watching films. For instance, if you wanted to write a flashback in a novel, you once had to really contextualize it a lot, to set it up. Now, readers know exactly what you're doing. Close-ups, too.

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

In television, the 60-minute series, 'The Wire' and 'Mad Men' and so on, the writer is the primary creative artist.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

You don't that often see writers being sought out when there are matters of great moment to discuss. And I think that's a loss.

In the movies, the writer is just the servant, the employee.