Janet Malcolm Quotes

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

I never think that any writer can teach someone how to write.

Writing is just very difficult. I'm an adequate performer. And I think I have a special talent as an editor. Editing is what I do best.

I never thought I was very good at developing material. I grew up at the BBC where they sent you scripts.

Pundits always have something to write about; the novelist just has a blank screen.

I don't know if I am a good, average, or bad writer, but I write fast. Everything I observe, my experiences and imagination come together while writing.

Ultimately, you've got to have something to say, so a writer should continue learning things throughout life. But I don't think education makes one a writer.

I think writing well takes a little bit of talent and an awful lot of work.

I think you have to learn for yourself how to write. I'm slightly mystified by creative writing courses - God love them - because I can't understand how you can explain a process that I find so baffling.

You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

I've always liked new writing.

I'm not a born writer, and I don't enjoy writing.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

Doing interesting things and then writing about them is the best way to become a good writer.

I find writing really difficult - definitely the most difficult of all the things I do.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

I have grown in my writing and I care about it now and I know how important it is to write stuff.

Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.

I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer.

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

As a writer, I'm not convinced that we are the best equipped to understand how we go about the business of literary production.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.