Quotes About Writing

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.

There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer - reading is so much a part of it.

I like to be happy when I'm writing. If not, then how will the reader manage?

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

The impulse to write comes, I think, from a desire - perhaps a need - to give imaginative life to experience, to share it with the reader, not to cover up the truth but to deliver it obliquely.

I don't have a disregard for my reader in humor pieces.

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

I'm not a very creative person, you know? I'm not really an art person. I'm not a great reader or writer or artist or musician.

I don't know if anything I write will endure, but I do try to write it as a narrative that will not only challenge but also entice the reader into the lives of children.

The kind of true-life writing that is fun to read - that makes an ally of the reader - is the kind that you are so nervous about putting down on paper that you lock the Word file with a secret password and encrypt it - and all of it.

I'd always been a big reader, and I loved books, and I always thought writing would be a great way to get by in the world.

I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.

I grew up writing thank-you notes. Real, honest-to-goodness, pen-and-ink, stamped and posted letters. More than simple habit, it's about what the commitment to expressing your thoughts and feelings in writing says about the character of the writer. About the joy such notes bring to the reader.

You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.

Any writer who gives a reader a pleasurable experience is doing every other writer a favor because it will make the reader want to read other books. I am all for it.

For me, writing essays is very much about processing ideas and offering them up to the reader so that they are fully cooked.

How a piece ends is very important to me. It's the last chance to leave an impression with the reader, the last shot at 'nailing' it. I love to write ending lines; usually, I know them first and write toward them, but if I knew how they came to me, I wouldn't tell.

If something's not working, it's wonderful to have a reader you can trust to say, 'Actually, you've gone off the deep end here'.

I think that reading is always active. As a writer, you can only go so far; the reader meets you halfway, bringing his or her own experience to bear on everything you've written. What I mean is that it is not only the writer's memory that filters experience, but the reader's as well.

I would say if you want to write, write what you care about. I think that's the most important thing. I think if you write what you care about, you stand a better chance of having the reader care about your story.

I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.

I tend to spend a lot of time building characters that the reader will believe in and sympathize with.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.