One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.
I came out of Capitol Hill. Well, that's just not an ordinary background for a writer of the ordinary American sort.
All writers I know are readers first and foremost, and that's why you become a writer.
Judaism is in all my books.
Happy children do not seem to grow up to be writers.
I knew I wanted to be a writer. Where I came from, no one was a writer. I came from Long Island, and everyone became a doctor or a lawyer or an engineer or a teacher or a businessman. I didn't know any writers.
I'm basically an Upper West Side Jewish writer.
I'm definitely more influenced by European writers than I am by American writers, there's no doubt about that.
My mother's side taught me to be a little bit afraid of everything. For a long time, I was quiet and cautious. But shyness makes you notice other people's excruciations and feel for them. I think that made a writer of me.
I think, personally - I don't know if other readers would agree - but reading 'Penumbra,' I detect an Internet writer or a writer who came up on the Internet.
I have no formal training as a writer at all, not even a single English class in college.
If I had been brought up in America, I think I would still have had the same sort of job as a writer.
Most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen.
Our principal writers have nearly all been fortunate in escaping regular education.
I think a lot of writers, male and female, write as if their parents were killed in a car accident when they were 2, and they have no one to hold accountable. And unfortunately, I don't have that. I have parents who I care about what they think.
Mice: What is the best early training for a writer? Y.C.: An unhappy childhood.
There are few things, apparently, more helpful to a writer than having once been a weird little kid.
One of the inspirations for my becoming a writer was the baseball board game Strat-O-Matic.
My mother had no idea that her daughter would turn out to be a writer, but she would not let me go through a day of my childhood without music.
I had a very happy childhood, which is unsuitable if you're going to be an Irish writer.
I think I have a pretty goofy profile for a writer. It seems to me most writers were reading 'Little Women' when they were 6 months old. At the age of a lot of my readers, I wanted to be a major league baseball player. I didn't read much.
