It's one thing to be banal, stupid, and idiotic on the inside. It's another to have it captured in writing.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Writing is taking a risk, and it is actually fighting invisible and invincible enemies. They are over-confidence, stupidity, expectation and narcissism.
A certain luxury when you get to writing a novel is to have the space to have your characters just banter.
Good writing is deceptive in that it hides its own artifice - it makes it seem easy.
I'm a right pain in the hole for my agent. I won't take certain parts if I think they're offensive or banal. For instance, I won't do a film if I think it's full of violence for violence's sake, or a television drama if I don't think it's intelligent writing.
I always believe writing is an indispensable part of one's political armoury.
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.
There are so many different things out there trying to hook our attention, we writers have to be very selective and make certain that it is coming from inside out, not outside in.
When you're on your own, you have all the self-censorship that everybody has when they try and write. All the little voices that say, 'No, you can't write that, what will they think of that?'
Writing is a marvelous adventure and very labor-intensive: those words run away and try to escape. They are very difficult to capture.
Readers are made by readers - it is so obvious it is almost banal to say it.