'Books are comforting, maybe especially when you're growing up, because reading a story that has a main character you can identify with, and - crucially - an ending you already know, is cathartic.'
‘To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself... Anybody can have ideas - the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.'
‘You don't choose the books, the books choose you. The best novel you can write at any given moment will be the one that's calling your name the loudest.'
‘I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel.'
‘Writing about historical figures is like trying to solve a mystery as you try to figure out who they were and get as close to them as you can without ever really knowing them.'
‘A really great children's book can hook a child. It can put a fish hook through their imagination and root them in the world of books for the rest of their lives.'
'I will never stop writing. People often ask when I will retire, but I say it's none of their business. Writing defines who I am. I love the feeling of holding a finished book in my hands, and then I can't wait to start the great adventure of writing the next one.'
'Sometimes the ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It's a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works. I like a mystery, as you may have noticed.'
‘If people don't like what I write, I just try to avoid that side of it. I get it. It doesn't bother me at all. I feel like when you have five books on the bestsellers list it's very hard to be upset in any way by criticism. Because you know that people out there are enjoying your work, and I just keep my focus on that.'
‘I'm interested in the effects of kindness. When I see kindness, I'm greatly moved by it, and I think most people are - they yearn for it. We live in a harsh world. People want to see the possibilities and the healing power of love.'
'Anybody who claims that one genre is categorically superior to all others must be ready and able to defend their prejudice. And that involves knowing what the ‘inferior' genres actually consist of, their nature and their forms of excellence. It involves reading them.'
‘You can't be best friends with a dragon in the real world. So writing fantasy is the next best thing. It's the genre where you can explore every impossible thought. It is a whole different mode for exploring life.'
'Writing isn't like math; in math, two plus two always equals four no matter what your mood is like. With writing, the way you feel changes everything.'
'Maybe I should say that memory interests me a great deal, because I think we all tell stories of our lives to ourselves as well as to other people. Well, women do, anyway. Women do this a lot. And I think when men get older, they do this too, but maybe in slightly different terms.'
‘I never really think of children when I do my books. Babar was my friend and I invented stories with him, but not with kids in a corner of my mind. I write it for myself.'
'Beginning a novel is always hard. It feels like going nowhere. I always have to write at least 100 pages that go into the trashcan before it finally begins to work. It's discouraging, but necessary to write those pages. I try to consider them pages -100 to zero of the novel.'
'I was trained by poetry where you can just write ambience and atmosphere. But in a novel, if there's not a story that people are interested in, with characters that they care about, they'll close the book.'
'The English language is an arsenal of weapons. If you are going to brandish them without checking to see whether or not they are loaded, you must expect to have them explode in your face from time to time.'
'The importance of developing a daily writing habit cannot be overstated. Even if you can only spare twenty minutes daily, consistent writing is the key to honing your skills, overcoming writer's block, and unlocking your creative potential.'
'You have to follow your own voice. You have to be yourself when you write. In effect, you have to announce, "This is me, this is what I stand for, this is what you get when you read me. I'm doing the best I can - buy me or not - but this is who I am as a writer."'
'And by the way, everything in life is writable about if you have the outgoing guts to do it, and the imagination to improvise. The worst enemy to creativity is self-doubt.'
'Good writing is remembering detail. Most people want to forget. Don't forget things that were painful or embarrassing or silly. Turn them into a story that tells the truth.'
'[As a writer] you have to have the three D's: drive, discipline and desire. If you're missing any one of those three, you can have all the talent in the world, but it's going to be really hard to get anything done.'
'Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap.'
'One of my great surprises when I was in America was about twenty-five years ago in Harvard, hearing Randall Jarrell deliver a bitter attack on the way poets were neglected. Yet there were about two thousand people present, and he was being paid five hundred dollars for delivering this attack.'