The most important training though is to experience life as a writer questioning everything inventing multiple explanations for everything. If you do that all the other things will come if you don't there's no hope for you.

But because we've all been readers we know what the experience is like and we hope that what certain writers have given to us we will give to someone.

My advice would be to write what is most personal and specific to your experience or your life. And your voice will emerge and because of its specificity it will be universal.

I had decided I wanted to write about food and I knew the only way to do that is to speak with authority which meant learning the language and knowing what that experience is like.

I have been blessed in many ways and one of those is to have been born in Africa for me a great treasure house of stories. I have been researching it since my infancy reading about it talking to men and women who have spent their lives in this land living it as I have and loving it as I do. I write almost entirely from my own experience.

A twenty-one-year-old writer is likely to be inhibited by a lack of usable experience. Childhood and adolescence were something I knew.

In my experience an appreciative letter from a fellow writer means a lot.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

You can use your means in a good and bad way. In German-speaking art we had such a bad experience with the Third Reich when stories and images were used to tell lies. After the war literature was careful not to do the same which is why writers began to reflect on the stories they told and to make readers part of their texts. I do the same.

I'm a method writer. In order to write about the emotion I have to experience it. I get physically tired and exhausted devoting hours and hours and hours to it.

The fact that I am a writer comes from the experience of being cut away from my roots and living in Venezuela where I couldn't find a place for myself for years and years.

Writing a story or a novel is one way of discovering sequence in experience of stumbling upon cause and effect in the happenings of a writer's own life.

Though 'Fire and Rain' is very personal for other people it resonates as a sort of commonly held experience... And that's what happens with me. I write things for personal reasons and then in some cases it... can be a shared experience.

A spy like a writer lives outside the mainstream population. He steals his experience through bribes and reconstructs it.

Some writers can only deal with childhood experience because it's complete. For another kind of writer life goes on and he's able to keep processing that as well.

I do write a lot from personal experience but I also embellish a bit.

I can't control what people think. I'm not trying to manipulate people's thoughts or sentiments. I write all the time. You have to experience life make observations and ask questions. It's machine-like how things are run now in hip-hop and my ambitions are different.

One nice thing about being a woman in Hollywood is that the women tend to be very close-knit. All of us writers and directors know each other and cling to each other for safety and support and it's really a completely different vibe than the men experience out here where they're all trying to murder each other.

The first essential in writing about anything is that the writer should have no experience of the matter.

We are increasingly likely to find ourselves in places with background music. No composers have thought to write for these modern spaces which represent 30% of our musical experience.

I write out of my intellectual experience.

Every secret of a writer's soul every experience of his life every quality of his mind is written large in his works.

As many political writers have pointed out commitment to political equality is not an empirical claim that people are clones.

I always thought we had an environmental problem but I hadn't realized how urgent it was. James Lovelock writes that by the end of this century there will be one billion people left.