John Green Quotes

I write the way I write.

It is easy to club people together, but there are bound to be influences of authors you've read. I grew up reading fast paced authors such as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer, but to say I'm one of them isn't true; my style is intrinsically my own.

I love to write. I used to be a math teacher. And I like the idea that other people could write about the same subjects, but no one would write it just the way I do. It's very individual: a child could write the same story as somebody else, but it wouldn't come out the same.

Many fiction writers write for the critics or for themselves; they forget the common reader. I never do. I don't think journalism clashes with my fiction; on the contrary, it helps enormously.

I write what I write.

There's something very self-conscious about a writer who's addressing his reader. Don't do that.

I prefer writing originals.

I'll agonize over sentences. Mostly because you're trying to create specific effects with sentences, and because there are a number of different voices in the book.

Call me the author.

I don't have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

The way to write is well, and how is your own business.

Robert Ludlum, all of them, write the absolute best they can. You can't tone it down. You just do what you do, and if it comes out literary, so be it.

I'm a novelist. I'm not a crusader, and I'm not an editorial writer. And I'm not writing fiction to convince anybody of anything.

I mean, if you lined up 100 writers, you'd get 100 different ways in which they write. There's no right way or wrong way to do it; it's whatever your process is.

I've never set out to seduce my reader. I don't see him at all clearly.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

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.

Dear though the reader might be, I'd be silly to cater to what the reader wanted.

I'm not sure there are too many people who write what I write.

I'm not a fan - this is a personal preference - I'm not a fan of tour-de-force writing. I admire it, but it's not where my inclination is. I want to hide.

The problem with being a writer is that some readers tend to think that anything that comes out of a character's mouth is you talking.

Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.

I'm not a writer, and I don't want there to be any mistake about that.

If you are any kind of writer at all, you are in all of your writings.

I'm more concerned with getting them to find and strengthen their original voice as writers rather than imposing my own subjective tastes, judgements or sensibility on the project.