Pastoral Resources

I have no ghost writers. I personally write every message and every piece of published mail.

Writers are too neurotic to ever be happy.

Since fantasy isn't about technology, the accelleration has no impact at all. But it's changed the lives of fantasy writers and editors. I get to live in England and work for a New York publisher!

I'd like to encourage people to please keep reading-and most importantly, to please keep trying new writers. The only way we can bring fresh new material into the field is if people go out and buy it.

Writers have to have a knack for listening. I need to be able to hear what is being said to me by the voices I create.

There are professional negotiators working for the writers and the actors, but basically you've got the writers and actors negotiating against businessmen. That's why you get rhetoric.

My whole life experience feeds into my writing. I think that must be true for every writer. Clearly the Army and combat were major influences; just the same, you need to understand that many of the writers we have now couldn't load a revolver.

Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.

And you can tell the writers who do it - Robert Stone, for example, who with each new novel is doing something new. I appreciate that in other writers.

But a lot of writers - and I'm one of them - do tend to feel dissatisfied. It makes you a little hard to live with, but it's a goad and does keep you alert and restless.

There are writers who do start doing the same thing again and again and almost inevitably fall into self-parody.

I'm more concerned with getting them to find and strengthen their original voice as writers rather than imposing my own subjective tastes, judgements or sensibility on the project.

I'm quite sure that most writers would sustain real poetry if they could, but it takes devotion and talent.

Some of the poetic writers who insert passages of realism in their texts have no underlying philosophy to uphold them, and revert to realism.

Today, for a Jew who writes in the German language, it is totally impossible to make a living. In no group do I see as much misery, disappointment, desperation and hopelessness as in Jewish writers who write in German.