The greatest part of a writer's time is spent in reading in order to write. A man will turn over half a library to make a book.

If you're living in your time you cannot help but to write about the things that are important.

A veteran journalist has never had time to think twice before he writes.

The man who writes about himself and his own time is the only man who writes about all people and about all time.

Substitute 'damn' every time you're inclined to write 'very' your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be.

If I could write a story that would do for the Indian one-hundredth part what 'Uncle Tom's Cabin' did for the Negro I would be thankful the rest of my life.

I take mentoring very seriously and I am on the board of an organization called Girls Write Now where we match teen girls and writing mentors because it changes their lives.

I decided that if I were to write a teen series I'd want to set it in a place that was familiar to me - Manhattan where I'd grown up - and I'd model the characters on myself and my friends.

I think I'm also more open to other writers being present and listening to other opinions whereas before I was going through my angsty teen years while making records.

In spite of advances in technology and changes in the economy state government still operates on an obsolete 1970s model. We have a typewriter government in an Internet age.

I try to write about how we live today how we use language technology our bodies.

Second we're spending a huge amount of money on technology so that everyone can check out laptops and portable phones. We're spending more money to write our existing information into databases or onto CD-ROM.

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!

We all rely on technology to communicate to survive to do our banking to shop to get informed but none of us knows how to read and write the code.

Real programmers can write assembly code in any language.

When I was a child I used to read books by Gerald Durrell who founded Jersey Zoo. He had a job collecting animals for zoos and for a long time that is what I wanted to do. Later when I was a teenager I had a fantastic English teacher called Mrs. Stafford. Her enthusiasm made me decide to be a writer.

That is a secondary teacher conception - the writer as an observer.

When I was about 13 or 14 I had an English teacher who made a deal with me that I could get out of doing all of the year's regular work if I would write a short story a week and on Friday read it to the class.

I felt like I was a teacher. But nowadays I am as much a student of his. He writes a lot of what we play.

After this I took private lessons in Italian from an elementary school teacher. He gave me themes to write about and some of them turned out so well that he told me to publish them in a newspaper.

My father was a writer and an acting teacher.

Writing became an obsessive compulsive habit but I had almost no money so I thought about being an urban firefighter and having lots of free time in which to write or becoming an English teacher and thinking about books and writers on a daily basis. That swayed me.

When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'

I remember telling my creative writing teacher that you never want to have a journal because if you lose it then someone's going to know all your secrets. And then she stopped using a journal but I always write everything down... Anytime I travel I try and fill up notepads.