Pastoral Resources

About the most originality that any writer can hope to achieve honestly is to steal with good judgment.

I was very pleased, obviously, to have outsold such great writers. But I'm not insane - I do realize that I am a popular writer who people buy to take on vacation.

I'm an escapist kind of writer.

A good writer is not, per se, a good book critic. No more so than a good drunk is automatically a good bartender.

It is impossible to read for pleasure from something to which you are both father and mother, born in such travail that the writer despises the thing that enslaved him.

You should never rely on interviews with musicians as being factual. Most of them are mangled and even have made up stuff in them, that is to say, made up stuff by the writer or editor.

A writer never reads his work. For him, it is the unreadable, a secret, and he cannot remain face to face with it. A secret, because he is separated from it.

Directors and writers have a lot of stress as well, because they have people they answer to.

The fact is that all writers create their precursors. Their work modifies our conception of the past, just as it is bound to modify the future.

Like all writers, he measured the achievements of others by what they had accomplished, asking of them that they measure him by what he envisaged or planned.

Kant and Hegel are interesting thinkers. But I am happy to insist that they are also terrible writers.

In Britain, because I live here, I can also run into problems of envy and competition. But all this is just in a day's work for a writer. You can't put stuff out there without someone calling you a complete fool. Oh, well.

I am conscious of trying to stretch the boundaries of non-fiction writing. It's always surprised me how little attention many non-fiction writers pay to the formal aspects of their work.

Writing, I think, is not apart from living. Writing is a kind of double living The writer experiences everything twice. Once in reality and once in that mirror which waits always before or behind.

For your born writer, nothing is so healing as the realization that he has come upon the right word.

Writers seldom choose as friends those self-contained characters who are never in trouble, never unhappy or ill, never make mistakes and always count their change when it is handed to them.

The importance to the writer of first writing must be out of all proportion of the actual value of what is written.

So I had a ghostwriter, they call them, or somebody who is an experienced writer, to help. I've got the ideas in my head, it's getting them properly on paper.

Basically I started to jot notes, lots of faxes back and forth to my writer, we faxed ideas throughout the whole first draft, and started all over again.

I don't call myself a writer.