I would love to see young writers come out of college and…

If the writers all come from the same backgrounds, you are going to get the same sorts of characters. Get a broader variety of…

— Sophie Okonedo

“The question one asks of the young writer who wants to know if he's got what it takes is this: "Is writing novels what…

— John Gardner

The hardest thing to teach young writers is that it's wonderful to tell your truth. And that's what you should do. But it damn…

— Dorothy Allison

Young writers shouldn't be afraid of striving to emulate their favorites. It's a good way to learn, as long as you move on from…

— Poppy Z. Brite

I became a novelist because of 'Gone With the Wind,' or more precisely, my mother raised me up to be a 'Southern' novelist, with…

— Pat Conroy

“A novelist must wrestle with all mysteries and strangeness of life itself, and anyone who dies not wish to accept that grand, bone-chilling commission…

— Pat Conroy

“I was at a party in 1989 and Ian McEwan, Martin Amis and Salman Rushdie were sitting on a sofa wondering where the next…

— Jeanette Winterson

My plan is to give new ideas to writers. They will come up with new subjects keeping me in mind.

— Jagapathi Babu

The best American writers have come from the hinterlands -- Mark Twain, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Hemingway, Faulkner, Wolfe, Steinbeck. Most of them never…

— Edward Abbey

Of course, the way writers think about those things is almost certain to be affected by their own cultural background, and it would be…

— Stanley Schmidt

I think maybe writers come from different planets. I mean, not in any sense as extravagant as Baryshnikov. But there are some writers who…

— Renata Adler

My mother would say it is literally ghost writers who come to me.

— Amy Tan

And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers…

— Stanley Schmidt

I just kind of talk about what's happening in my life and it's kind of like a therapy session. Usually something good comes out…

— Loren Gray

But I suspect that all writers come up with premises of some kind, fragments of narrative or scenarios, in the course of a working…

— Nick Hornby