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Quotes

‘Starting with a blank page is part of what makes writing a book so vulnerable. A novel can be anything, and the way it turns out is highly personal.'

‘In a children's book, the child must be the agent. You mustn't take the meat and potatoes of the story away from the child.'

'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.'

'Words can be like X-rays if you use them properly - they'll go through anything. You read and you're pierced.'

‘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.'

'There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly: sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.'

‘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.'

'Writers, however mature and wise and eminent, are children at heart.'

'Just write every day of your life. Read intensely. Then see what happens. Most of my friends who are put on that diet have very pleasant careers.'

'Some novels known as the greatest works of literature are crime novels, and some crime novels are great works of literature.'

'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.'

'I only write when I'm inspired, so I see to it that I'm inspired every morning at nine o'clock.'

'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.'

'The scariest moment is always just before you start. After that, things can only get better.'

‘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.'

'To achieve lasting literature, fictional or factual, a writer needs perceptive vision, absorptive capacity, and creative strength.'

'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.'

'Being a good writer is 3% talent, 97% not being distracted by the Internet.'

Anon

'Your job is to make your novel the best of its kind that it can be.'

'A professional writer is an amateur who didn't quit.'

'[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.'

'Every writer I know has trouble writing.'

'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.'

‘For me it always starts with the characters, and I hope that the characters take me to the plot - that's the plan, anyhow. I just start with a few ideas and hope it works out. I suppose if having written 28 books has taught me anything, it's that it might work out in the end.'

'Talent is cheaper than table salt. What separates the talented individual from the successful one is a lot of hard work.'

'If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.'

'Close the door. Write with no one looking over your shoulder. Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say. It's the one and only thing you have to offer.'

‘Writing fiction is fun. Writing non-fiction is life-changing.'

'I don't know why I started writing. I don't know why anybody does it. Maybe they're bored, or failures at something else.'

‘There is no secret to success except hard work and getting something indefinable which we call "the breaks". In order for a writer to succeed, I suggest three things - read and write - and wait.'

'Language leads a double life - and so does the novelist. You chat with family and friends, you attend to your correspondence, you consult menus and shopping lists, you observe road signs, and so on. Then you enter your study, where language exists in quite another form - as the stuff of patterned artifice.'

'If I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.'

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