O'Casey was writing about people in the streets and his mother and dying babies and poverty. So that astounded me because I thought you could only write about English matters.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
As writers, we don't just need to write about poverty or war or the immigrant experience.
An English journalist called Michael Viney told me when I was 25, that I would write well if I cared a lot what I was writing about. That worked. I went home that day and wrote about parents not understanding their children as well as we teachers did, and it was published the very next week.
American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.
Writing is about culture and should be about everything. That's what makes it what it is.
A lot of people who wrote for 'Sex and the City' have gone to write about marriage and motherhood.
Family matters, friends matter, love matters. Those you love and who love you matter. That's what writing does - it allows you to say all those things.
It seems that so much writing is being done in the nineteenth-century model, where every connection has to be thoroughly explained.
'Et Tu, Babe' was born out of my absolute certainty that a writer's life was solitary and insular, and I was happy with that. I love reading and writing; it's my whole life.
A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.
Fundamentally, all writing is about the same thing; it's about dying, about the brief flicker of time we have here, and the frustration that it creates.