At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.
And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.
Then you start another book and suddenly the galley proofs of the last one come in and you have to wrench your attention away from what you're writing and try to remember what you were thinking when you wrote the previous one.
One book at a time... though I'm usually doing the research for others while I'm writing, but that sort of research is fairly desultory and I like to stick to the book being written - and writing a book concentrates the mind so the research is more productive.
Writing is a solitary occupation.
The beautiful part of writing is that you don't have to get it right the first time, unlike, say, a brain surgeon. You can always do it better, find the exact word, the apt phrase, the leaping simile.
I touched an Oscar once. Friend of mine has one, for writing. As soon as I touched it, he said, Now you'll never win one.
Very curious, at the age of about 13 years, Oswald began to study Marxism and he kept on in his writing, affirming that he was a Marxist. Probably he did want to show himself as a great, supreme Marxist.
If you write a story based on a real person, you're trapped by the details of the real person and his life. It gets in the way of writing your own story.
I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession.
Always be nice to those younger than you, because they are the ones who will be writing about you.
Literature is the art of writing something that will be read twice; journalism what will be grasped at once.
I think I would spend the first 30 weeks not writing, just clearing my head and seeing parts of the world I haven't seen and going back to places I have seen and love.
Writing has never been a driving force within me.
I think the thing that has made it possible for me to write personal songs and sing them year after year is the sensibility for good writing. Just opening your veins all over the paper is not necessarily going to be interesting. I wanted to speak to people.