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Preserving that privacy between a writer and the work is important. You have to shut out all those voices that have reacted to your work.

You cannot have the media so close to you that it becomes your voice. This is no good because it becomes too extreme, and people will resent it.

Since the advent of the Internet - more recently compounded by blogging - everyone can be a published voice. Any cowardly, anonymous anger-monger can have an audience of thousands. That doesn't make them a journalist any more than my throwing an onion and a few carrots into a pot of boiling water makes me Julia Child.

A writer has an inescapable voice. I think it's inherent in the nature, and I think that we don't control it anymore than we control what we want to write about.

My work is literally my voice.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

Sometimes you find your voice by trying to write like people, and sometimes you find it by trying to write unlike people.

I'm grateful that, after an early life of being silenced, sometimes violently, I grew up to have a voice, circumstances that will always bind me to the rights of the voiceless.

Your writing voice is the deepest possible reflection of who you are. The job of your voice is not to seduce or flatter or make well-shaped sentences. In your voice, your readers should be able to hear the contents of your mind, your heart, your soul.