Tao Lin Quotes

I'd go for "really great writer." Although I don't think I am. I know I have a style which is recognizable. I think you can see Terry Pratchett in every book. I like doing it. I was once a journalist. And I think of myself as a journalist, and that's it.

It is easy to club people together, but there are bound to be influences of authors you've read. I grew up reading fast paced authors such as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer, but to say I'm one of them isn't true; my style is intrinsically my own.

I started out of course with Hemingway when I learned how to write. Until I realized Hemingway doesn't have a sense of humor. He never has anything funny in his stories.

I write what I can. I think being able to write like Michael Connelly and have a character that goes from novel to novel, or to dramatize history like Vidal or Ellroy, or have an explosively inventive mind like Bulgakov, would be an incredible thing. I don't have that. I only have what I have.

My style of writing is very diffrent from yours.

I think the best writers are voracious readers who pick up the cadences and the feel of narration through a number of different books. And you begin by maybe copying the style of writers that really knocked you out.

Who were my mentors in poetry and literature? This is a matter of opinion. Some see in my books the influences of authors whose names, in my ignorance, I have not even heard, while others see the influences of poets whose names I have heard but whose writings I have not read. And what is my opinion? From whom did I receive nurture? Not every man remembers the name of the cow which supplied him with each drop of milk he has drunk.

About four years ago I made a list, for my own amusement, of the playwrights, the contemporary playwrights, by whom critics said I'd been influenced. I listed twenty-five. It included five playwrights whose work I didn't know, so I read these five playwrights and indeed now I suppose I can say I have been influenced by them. The problem is that the people who write these articles find the inevitable similarities of people writing in the same generation, in the same century, and on the same planet, and they put them together in a group.

It took me thirty-six years; and, in some fifty stories, ranging in length from short-shorts to novels, I think I must have touched, in one way or another, on every aspect of computers and computerization. And (mark this!) I did it without ever knowing anything at all about computers in any real sense. To this day, I don't. I am totally inept with machinery... on my typewriter I turn out books at the contemptible rate of one a month

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

Perhaps one would be wise when young even to avoid thinking of oneself as a writer - for there's something a little stopped and satisfied, too healthy, in that. Better to think of writing, of what one does as an activity, rather than an identity - to write, I write; we write; to keep the calling a verb rather than a noun; to keep working at the thing, at all hours, in all places, so that your life does not become a pose, a pornography of wishing.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

I want to do something splendid… Something heroic or wonderful that won’t be forgotten after I’m dead… I think I shall write books.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

I discovered that I had, in the past two decades, written a far greater amount in the essay form than I remembered. Certainly I have written enough of it to demonstrate that I harbor no disdain for literary journalism or just plain journalism, under whose sponsorship I have been able to express much that has fascinated me, or alarmed me, or amused me, or otherwise engaged my attention when I was not writing a book.

I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

Writing a book is like an unknown abyss, every time. Every book is different. Contrary to what unpublished writers think, it's horrible to have a book out.

I think I was always writing books that had very clear scenic structures. I do tend to write in scenes. I do tend to have a fair amount of dialogue. And I do tend to use stories that don't sprawl all over the place, that have a very sharp focus in terms of how they unfold in time.

I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.

If you find yourself imitating another writer, that doesn't have to be a bad thing, especially if you are a young or a new writer. However, you should be conscious of exactly how you are imitating him - word choice, sentence structure, motifs? - and think about why you're doing it.

It's rare that you get to read, let alone teach, an arbitrary canon of your choosing in a tight time setting, and I tore through a fairly wide range of Indian writers, some contemporary - like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie - and others older, like R.K. Narayan. And I think what happened at that stage was that I was forced to take a position in my own writing style that was more fixed, as opposed to reading a book at a time and defining myself in opposition to or in awe of it.

Everything in my past, in my training, everything that has been most essential in my activity up to now has made me above all a man who writes, and it is too late for that to change.

My prose style at this time was a stomach-twisting blend of the Bible, Carl Sandburg, H.L. Mencken, Jeffrey Farnol, Christopher Morley, Samuel Pepys, and Franklin Pierce Adams imitating Samuel Pepys. I was quite apt to throw in a "bless the mark" at any spot, and to begin a sentence with "Lord" comma.

As I get older and write more books I'm definitely allowing the humorous side of my personality more rein in my work.

It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect, it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances.