Quotes

‘To get the right word in the right place is a rare achievement. To condense the diffused light of a page of thought into the luminous flash of a single sentence, is worthy to rank as a prize composition just by itself... Anybody can have ideas - the difficulty is to express them without squandering a quire of paper on an idea that ought to be reduced to one glittering paragraph.'

‘I read anything that's going to be interesting. But you don't know what it is until you've read it. Somewhere in a book on the history of false teeth there'll be the making of a novel.'

'Read More than You Write.If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.'

'There are three rules for writing the novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.'

‘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.'

'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.'

‘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.'

'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.'

‘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.'

'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.'

'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.'

'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.'

‘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.'

'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 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.'

'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.'

'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.'

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

'[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.'

'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.'