If I write what I feel, it's to reduce the fever of feeling. What I confess is unimportant, because everything is unimportant.
Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.
The darkness has ink eyes, and if you stare long enough, you’re going to see it blink black. That’s the moment to start writing.
When I write my dreams down, I can relive my sleep when I am awake.
I love writing about love, even though I’m an emotional orphan. I didn’t abandon my feelings—they abandoned me!
I want to write an unreliable narrator. In fact, he’ll be so unreliable that I’m not even sure he’ll show up to narrate.
I was never a great reader, but there were two stories I loved best: Kipling's 'The Elephant's Child' and 'The Jungle Book.' Deep down, I've always wanted to write a book about a wild child and an elephant.
I think there's a difference between having a bestselling book - meaning through marketing, PR and buying that first wave of customers - and writing a bestselling book. The second implies that the product propels itself to the best seller list.
I've seen people around me write books, and somehow they're always in the center of everything that happened; they were the one who made it happen. There's been a lot of those books that didn't really interest me much.
There's a book that's critical to understanding anxiety, a 17th-century book, 'The Anatomy of Melancholy,' by Robert Burton. I wanted to write something like that.
Here's a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they'd intended to write.
You want the book to be special, and they are not always going to be special, but at least you want that to be the ambition. So the only way that happens is if you are not pressing to write a book.
To read a book, to think it over, and to write out notes is a useful exercise; a book which will not repay some hard thought is not worth publishing.
In the early 1980s, I wrote a book called 'The Complete Guide to Financial Privacy.' If I would write that book today, it would be a pamphlet. There is precious little privacy left.
I've written a lot of really good books. Now we'll see if I can write any more good books. I mean there's a chance I won't, but I'm going to try.
A good writer cannot avoid having social consciousness. I don't mean this about small pieces of writing, but about a big book. If it's a big book, there has to be more than one undertow.
I grew up reading comic books, pulp books, mystery and science fiction and fantasy. I'm a geek; I make no pretensions otherwise. It's the stuff that I love writing about. I like creating worlds.
Everyone has a book within them. Everyone has to write it thinking, 'How will I help other people? What will the book do to touch lives?'
I labored for eight years thinking I was writing a book for adults that was a nostalgic look back on childhood. Then my publisher informed me I'd written a children's book.
I try not to worry about rewriting books that worked well the first time. I'm too busy writing new books to worry about things that are already in print.
When I was 19 years old, I wrote my first book. I took a computer science class, and the book was garbage. I thought I could write a better one, so I did.
