I can't retire. My readers won't let me.
A writer should care about one thing - the language. To write well - that is his duty. That is his only duty.
Most of the people I write about I'm still in touch with, so I would be loath to make up stuff about them.
So the writer who breeds more words than he needs, is making a chore for the reader who reads.
In relation to a writer, most readers believe in the Double Standard: they may be unfaithful to him as often as they like, but he must never, never be unfaithful to them.
The older you get, the more power you have with language as a writer, which means that you have to be extra responsible for what you say, whether it's in print or in front of a microphone, because those words can go out and kill or go out and plant seeds for peace.
In writing biography, fact and fiction shouldn't be mixed. And if they are, the fictional points should be printed in red ink, the facts printed in black ink.
When I look at what a writer owes to the reader, it's critical to know that everything you're writing about is not made up in your head. I feel that unless you can document and be certain about what it is that you're writing about, the reader is going to lose faith in your own integrity.
What makes me furious, not just because we're in an interview, but I don't like when writers take your words and put them somewhere else, in the wrong context in their own article about you.
The writer has to make pleasure for the reader - which, I think, is done by taking one's character's seriously and taking one's readers seriously -don't condescend or try to be tricky. Be a friend to your reader - I'd say that's a pretty good first step.
Readers want a good book; it's a writer's job to give it to them.
As a writer, I've always felt it's my job to be extremely careful when writing about victims, especially women.
The recent controversy over the portrayal of Ken Taylor and his embassy staff in the movie 'Argo' brought home to me the great responsibility we writers have when telling stories that involve real people.
We should not write so that it is possible for [the reader] to understand us, but so that it is impossible for him to misunderstand us.
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus
Much of an editor's job is in fact pretty nanny-like in nature: in many ways, you're there to protect and defend, to reassure and clean up. What I ask from writers is respect. I want them to respect me enough to turn in a clean draft. I want that draft to be as good as they can make it. I want to feel the thought behind those words. And I want it to be turned in on time. It drives me wild when I get a story that's obviously slapped together, and the same can be said for a manuscript; you should respect your reader enough to give her something that reflects your best efforts.
Any medium can only live up to the strengths of the people working in it. If it's been used to tell bad or boring stories, it's not a problem with comics; it's a problem with the writers of those comics.
You can't blame a writer for what the characters say.
I don't think that writers have any responsibility to be good neighbors to the audience.
I have suffered a great deal from writers who have quoted this or that sentence of mine either out of its context or in juxtaposition to some incongruous matter which quite distorted my meaning, or destroyed it altogether.
I just feel that if people write about a film, then they should also write about audience's response.
As a writer, you must know what promise your story or novel makes. Your reader will know.
The writer cannot abandon himself simply to inspiration, and feign innocence vis a vis language, because language is never innocent.
There is a contract between the reader and the writer. The readers give me their hard-earned cash, and I have to entertain them.
The responsibility of the writer is to be a sort of demonic social critic -- to present the world and people in it as he sees it and say, "Do you like it? If you don't like it, change it.
Writing can sometimes be exploitative. I like to take a few steps of remove in order to respect the privacy of the subject. If readers make the link, they have engaged with the poem.
