Sophie Kinsella Quotes

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

I think that if you have a knack for storytelling, and you work really hard at it, you'll have a chance to tap into something deep. But the fact remains that good sentences are hard won. Any writer worth a lick knows constructing a sentence, a paragraph, or a chapter is hard work.

If you are a good writer - and I think I am - you are able to handle any kind of group and imagine their lives.

Fiction writing and journalism, in my experience, are really excellent training grounds for each other.

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

I had the most incredible English and literature teachers in school, and it really influenced my love of storytelling. It's what made me excited to study journalism in college. I love editorials and documentaries. All of that came from being given the opportunity to lose myself in good writing when I was a kid.

I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.

No, you're either born a writer, a storyteller, or you're not.

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.

Well, I'm a writer by nature, and I got a little bit - a little taste of a daily fast-paced writing job, writing career, and I loved it.

I'm not famous for my back story investigations; I'm lucky that I work with good writers and it's usually in the script.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.

When I tell people there are three stories in 'Thunderstruck' that were from the same wrecked novel, they want to guess what they are. Nobody has. There are no characters or timelines in common. They're structured very differently. A good novel wouldn't have pulled apart so easily.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

I'm an efficient, good, professional reporter. But I also write. And so what I try to do is write about places that I know that I care about intensely and write about them in a way that conveys the fact that I care.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

You know, as fiction writers, if our instincts are off, we can't pay our bills.

I think of myself now as a writer, although I wouldn't go as far as to say 'novelist' because that sounds like a Victorian person.

There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer - reading is so much a part of it.

I want to become a very good writer.

Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped.

I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

It's hard to read good fiction when I am writing, because if it is really good I catch myself sort of inadvertently imitating a great writer.

I am a comic writer, which means I get to slay the dragons, and shoot the bull.