If you do enough planning before you start to write, there's no way you can have writer's block. I do a complete chapter by chapter outline.

I am not a consecutive writer.

My idea of a writer: someone interested in everything.

I'm not a very good writer, but I'm an excellent rewriter.

It is the function of art to renew our perception. What we are familiar with we cease to see. The writer shakes up the familiar scene, and, as if by magic, we see a new meaning in it.

There are three reasons for becoming a writer: the first is that you need the money; the second that you have something to say that you think the world should know; the third is that you can't think what to do with the long winter evenings.

During the holiday season, it's easy to forget that sometimes the best gift of all is simply the gift of time. I can't think of anything a writer would appreciate more than being given time and space to work.

In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.

Good evening, ladies and gentleman. My name is Orson Welles. I am an actor. I am a writer. I am a producer. I am a director. I am a magician. I appear onstage and on the radio. Why are there so many of me and so few of you?

An autobiography usually reveals nothing bad about its writer except his memory.

A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.

At the drabber moments of my life (swilling some excrement from the steps, for instance, or rooting with a bent coat-hanger down a blocked sink) thoughts occur like 'I bet Tom Stoppard doesn't have to do this' or There is no doubt David Hare would have deputed this to an underling'.

The only advice I have to give a young novelist is to fuck a really good agent.

A man's got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.

Most people who seek attention and regard by announcing that they're writing a novel are actually so devoid of narrative talent that they can't hold the attention of a dinner table for thirty seconds, even with a dirty joke.

If you asked someone, 'Can you play the violin?' and he says, 'I don't know, I have not tried, perhaps I can,' you laugh at him. Whereas about writing, people always say: 'I don't know, I have not tried,' as though one had only to try and one would become a writer.

My ideal job? Landlord of a bordello! The company's good and the mornings are quiet, which is the best time to write.

Seventeen publishers rejected the manuscript, at which time we knew we had something pretty hot.

If you want to write ... you must lurk in libraries and climb the stacks like ladders to sniff books like perfumes and wear books like hats upon your crazy heads.