I think if someone is writing continuously for 10 years and has not changed their mind about something - there's something wrong with them. They're not really thinking.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
I figure that that has a ten year cycle. At the end of that ten years, I began to get worried that I would run into what is known as the writer's block, the feeling of not being able to do these things.
In twenty years I've never had a day when I didn't have to think about someone else's needs. And this means the writing has to be fitted around it.
I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years.
If I was going to write something, I'd need to stop for three months and just see if I had any thoughts in there.
Writers know that sometimes things are there in the drawer for decades before they finally come out and you are capable of writing about them.
I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'
Writers seem to me to be people who need to retire from social life and do a lot of thinking about what's happened - almost to calm themselves.
I always write after I think for quite a long time, so the actual writing time is rather short. I think a lot of the work gets done when you have something on your mind while you're doing many other things.
Writing can't change the world overnight, but writing may have an enormous effect over time, over the long haul.
A lot of writing is thinking.