Quotes About Writing

With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.

I just wrote what I felt like writing since they seemed to sell.

Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.

When my mother left her second husband, she wrote her autobiography and presented it to him for his approval.

The book, you understand, was not written for publication. It was the portrayal of my emotions, the analysis of my own soul life during three months of my nineteenth year. I wrote then all the time, just as I do now, but, though the book is in diary form, it is not a diary.

Once I was condemned to three months' absolute silence. As I could not speak, I wrote a book.

Whenever I was trying to get over a boy, I would write him a really long, wrought letter - but never mail it.

In 1999, I had my back against the wall, and WWE had a ghostwriter working on an autobiography for me. He was halfway through, and it was awful, just boring. I took over as a way of trying to fix things, as I thought I could probably do a better job.

As a writer for six years, I wrote my own TV, which, I was the only person in the WWE that could probably honestly say, since day one in NXT, they wrote their own material.

At the time I was writing 'Weedflower,' my friend Naomi Hirahara was writing a book about Japanese-American flower farmers. She knew quite a few elderly farmers and put me in touch with four or five of them who had been in camps during WWII. Some, like my father, were reluctant to talk about their experiences.

I was so naive about writing, I went to the public library and checked out the only volume they had on the topic - an academic treatise about publishing from the WWII era.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.

I've always wanted to be a part of that experience of writing to an audience that is just starting to fall in love with books. When I felt that my writing for adults had become cemented, I decided to write a YA series.

The only thing that makes a book YA is that it is about teenagers, and it is written in a very conventional, non-artsy, non-pretentious way. YA is not the place for the oblique or the cryptic. If it is in any way experimental in form, it is not YA.

I write the story as it comes to me - YA is my natural voice, not a conscious choice.

I have no formal training as a writer at all, not even a single English class in college. However, my adult books are all science fiction, which has some similarities to YA.

I had something to prove and went in the studio and started writing. I got into fitness and style and learned the whole craft. That was when I wrote everything on the album. I put out 'Don't Ya,' and it took off.

While I'm writing YA, I can't read YA, and the same with adult. I usually only listen to music while I'm writing YA.

It's funny, we started writing chick-lit when it was just becoming a crowded marketplace, and now the same thing is happening with YA. It really used to just be one shelf at the library - Nancy Drew and Judy Blume.

Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the 'Queen of Everything,' I thought it was a book for adults.

Plot is a framework on which to drape other things. So once that's working, I can just let it go and do all the stuff that I love - 'Trojan horse' it. There are so many great YA heroines, and that's fantastic, but what about the emotionally complex boy out there? That's who I tend to write about.

In terms of age, I think I've covered about as wide a range as is possible, having written everything from picture books to early chapter books to middle grade novels to YA to one adult novel - and having been editor and lead writer for a magazine for retired people!

I didn't consciously make the decision to write an adult novel. I didn't think of it as my riposte to the YA genre.

I've always been fond of Tim Drake/Robin. I suppose it's the YA writer in me. I enjoy the intensity of young, smart heroes. I'd love to write him in either graphic or prose form.