Walter Kirn Quotes

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.

The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

I think most serious writers, certainly in the modern period, use their own lives or the lives of people close to them or lives they have heard about as the raw material for their creativity.

So much of my own life inspires what I write. Whether it's work, family, friends, motherhood, I am a writer who tends to write what she knows. In 'Revenge Wears Prada,' a great deal of my own life finds its way into the book.

Most of my characters are an amalgamation of people that I've met, my family, or myself. Being a writer, you can draw only from what you know. I am lucky to have really rich and interesting people in my family for, you know, interesting family nights and great characters.

That's the advantage of being a writer: No matter what happens, as long as you survive it, it goes into the work.

I never, ever talk about writing to anyone at all.

Most writers, I'm afraid, live very boring lives sitting in front of a screen. However, having said that: every writer puts a bit of themselves into the characters to bring them alive.

Sleep with Seth Mortensen? Good grief. It was the most preposterous thing I'd ever heard. It was appalling. If I absorbed his life force, there was no telling how long it'd be until his next book came out.

Bad things don't happen to writers; it's all material.

I think our material is our lives. That's part of being a modern writer, and we have to use it.

One of the greatest gifts you can get as a writer is to be born into an unhappy family.

Nothing bad can happen to a writer. Everything is material.

A writer never has a vacation. For a writer, life consists of either writing or thinking about writing.

And life is a good thing for a writer. It's where we get our raw material, for a start. We quite like to stop and watch it.

Any life will provide the material for writing, if it is attended to.

the writer is initially set going by literature more than by life.

You can't be a writer and have nothing to write about. You have to have life experiences.

The best life for a writer is the life which helps him write the best books he can.