Quotes About Writing

When I settled to writing seriously, which would be in my 30s, I did expect to be published eventually, but my aspirations weren't very high. A published book and a few appreciative readers was my idea of heaven.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

I'd like to set a story in Australia, but I would need to feel confident my German and U.S. readers, for example, would stay with me.

My parents were avid readers. Both had ambitions to write that had been abandoned early in life in order to get on with life.

Soon after publishing a book for kids, my mailbox began to fill with letters from children all across America. Not because my novels for young readers are bestsellers - they're not by a long shot - but because today's kids love to write to authors.

I wrote my first full book when I was fourteen, and that was 'Obernewtyn.' It was also the first book I had published. It was accepted by the first publisher I sent it to, and it was short listed for Children's Book of the Year in the older readers category in Australia.

I just try to write the best story I can, a story I would love to read, and hope that readers feel the same.

I believe that if writers want their readers to care about a character, they have to care themselves. I have to root for a detective who screws up as much as Thorne does, who shares my birthday, my North London stomping ground, and my love of country music, both alt and cheesy.

We all need to focus on our writing. Because the millions of readers out there don't care about your blog.

All writers I know are readers first and foremost, and that's why you become a writer.

'In the Cut' was not what readers expected of me. Before it was published, I was seen as a women's writer, which meant that I wrote movingly about flowers and children.

You should never ask, 'What would the readers like now?' Instead, you should ask, 'What would I like if I was a reader?' And then you must trust your own mind.

You write alone, but you write hoping that there will be readers who will connect with what you write, and it's so wonderful and amazing - I can't even tell you - when that actually happens.

As a children's author, you get to advocate for reading and writing in general, in a way an adult author might not be able to. It's a really interesting dance we do to get literature into the hands of young people and to help them to become literate and become readers; we want them to grow up reading and continue to do so when they're adults.

Writing is a way of living. It doesn't quite matter that there are too many books for the number of readers in the world to read them. It's a way of being alive for the writer.

If readers tell you that stretches of dialogue or narrative were too long, that they couldn't tell who was talking, that's something that can be fixed.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

I have readers everywhere: from a radiologist who decides to compliment me on my writing while inserting a probe to check my ovaries to 80-year-olds who send me emails. And, of course, women my age everywhere.

As soon as I finished 'The Finkler Question,' I was in despair. I'd changed my English publisher because they'd been lukewarm about it and not offered enough money. The American publisher didn't like it. The Canadian publisher didn't like it... I'd been bleeding readers since my first novel, and I could see my own career going down.

There are writers, and there are readers who want something more. They want to get at the grist of life.

After my first book, many of my readers came back to tell me that the female characters I had created were not strong enough. I have consciously rectified that in my next four books. In any case, it's true that women run the world, and men would do better to listen to them!

I can't retire. My readers won't let me.

Language description and metaphors seem readily available. The things I have to work harder at are plot, pacing, and form.

When I had worked on my first book, I had readily shown bits and pieces to everyone - for encouragement, to force myself to write.