Authors may be divided into falling stars, planets, and fixed stars: the first have a momentary effect; the second have a much longer duration; but the third are unchangeable, possess their own light, and work for all time.
I'm not interested in the fact that a writer may label himself as being intellectual or anti-intellectual. l'm really interested in the stuff he's turning out.
I escaped the [Southern-writer] label because I didn't and don't write about the South.
I'm not a science-fiction writer. I've only written one book that's science fiction, and that's Fahrenheit 451. All the others are fantasy.
Is the biographer an artist who can and should exist on equal terms with the dramatist, fiction writer and poet? The short and robust answer is, 'Certainly not.'
I've never liked the publishing world's determination to pigeonhole every writer into a genre.
At one time in my career, Barnes and Noble bookstores categorized my books as religious fiction.
I don't think of gay writers. I mean if you were to say to me who are the straight writers, well, you wouldn't ask me that question. So for me to identify a little tribe of gay writers, I don't know.
I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn't go as far as to say 'novelist' because that sounds like a Victorian person.
Am I really an author if I just put pictures in a book?
I'm proudly a crime writer, but it would be really inaccurate to call me a mystery writer.
In the past, I was sometimes put in this women's lit category, and I was never really sure that was the appropriate place for me - although I certainly recognize it can be helpful and correct for other people.
Publishers have published women's fiction into a corner, and now we are all trying to punch our way out of it. We just have to write the best books we possibly can and hope that, once the pink covers and Bridget Jones have faded from memory, we might finally be allowed just to be called writers.
I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.
