I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.
Writers
I got interested in the question of literacy because writers are always moaning about why more people don’t read books.
Great writers arrive among us like new diseases threatening, powerful, impatient for patients to pick up their virus, irresistible.
I always had good recognition from the Southern writers, but the publishers never took any notice of that.
I like writers who can show me worlds I know nothing about, but my favorites are those who create characters or worlds which feel realistic and familiar to me, or who can make me feel inspired.
When younger writers and poets, musicians and painters are weakened by a stemming of funds, they come to me saddened, not as full of dreams and excitement and ideas. I am then weakened and diminished, and made less rich.
Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.
We are the only school in America, drama school in America that trains actors, writers and directors side by side for three years in a master’s degree program, and we want them – to expose them to everything.
People have expectations of what you are as a writer. And writers, on the whole, don’t like to be classified.
There are some fine books and essays about that. Lewis Hyde has written about alcoholism and poets and the role that society gives its writers – encouraging them to die.