Quotes About Writing

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I was always influenced by language.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

I think I became a writer because I didn't know of anything else to do. Maybe some incident from my childhood influenced me.

Probably every book I read influenced me in some small way. Authors like Jan Westcott, Kathleen Winsor, Catherine Cookson, Georgette Heyer, and even Barbara Cartland taught me to write character-driven stories.

I'm not sure there's a difference between books that affected the way I see the world and books that influenced me as a writer.

When I was in high school, I started writing a serial novel, longhand, set in the Arthurian mythos, and influenced not incidentally by Marion Zimmer Bradley's 'The Mists of Avalon.'

Most writers have been influenced by Faulkner.

No author's writing more influenced my own than that of Robert Louis Stevenson. My first steampunk story, 'The Ape-box Affair,' is a sort of melange of Stevenson and P.G. Wodehouse.

I'm never really conscious of what I'm being influenced by when I'm writing.

I don't watch too much television because I want to write something, and you never want to be influenced by other things that are on - and if they're really funny it'll just depress me because it's something I'm not a part of.

I have read H.P. Lovecraft, and I understand why he has influenced so much of horror writing. But because of his history, I wasn't a huge fan.

I can't tell you any more than any other writer can tell you why they write, and I don't know what my influences are.

The things I write are combinations of all of the people that have been influences to me.

Don't copy another writer's style, because that is not authentic, and that's how it will sound. You develop your style over your whole life and through countless influences. Don't impose something artificial.

Skipp and Spector's 'Books of the Dead' were huge influences on me as a writer.

My own accumulation of influences is actually what made me a writer in the first place.

For me, influences really come from everywhere: literature, comics, movies, anime, Internet, science, real-life situations. In fact, I think that writing is just about living.

People writing about me have said that I've influenced a lot of people, and there are some artists who have credited me with influencing them.

I write what feels real. I write things that are informed both by my own experience and by actual history.

I love writing for young people. It's the literature that was most important to me, the stories that shaped me and informed my own journey as a writer.

I'm really focused and obsessed with writing things that are specific. I don't like big rock lyrics - I find them infuriating.

I don't want to write formula. I don't want to crank these books out like sausages. Every book is different, which takes a hell of a lot of ingenuity on my part.

When I write I inhabit a personality that is and is not me.