Kate Grenville Quotes

I can read in any book and newspaper about the city of Detroit, but I want to hear what the people in Detroit have to say about Detroit. My best education is actually talking to people.

Giving oneself permission to write to begin with is the first enormous challenge. But you discover that this permission involves a requirement: To write about things that are difficult because they are, in fact, your subject.

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.

So I think a writer should write what he loves, the people he relates to.

Write because you love it and not because it is something that you think you should do. Always write about something or somebody you know about - something that you feel deeply and passionately about. Never try and force it.

I spent a little time in Germany as a schoolboy learning German, and it's a country I knew very well, spent a lot of time in. I knew the history very well. I've always wanted to do a piece of work about the post-war period, of one sort or another.

I'm not comparing myself at all to him, but I like the idea that Ernest Hemingway always wrote about certain things he knew, he knew the ins and outs, back to fronts of what he was talking about. I love that as an inspiration for myself, to keep it true to what you know.

I always pull from something I know really well. Because I would never want to write about something that I hadn't experienced or that I hadn't witnessed happen to somebody else because it wouldn't be genuine.

I can't write about people I don't feel some sort of connection to.

Most of the time I was in the Northeast, I lived in the country, and I think that helped me to discover my material for writing.

I don't write anything that I hadn't experienced or hadn't been through.

Every time I wrote a school scene, I thought of that drama studio, because that's where I was a bit lost at sea.

Write what you know. Every guide for the aspiring author advises this. Because I live in a long-settled rural place, I know certain things. I know the feel of a newborn lamb's damp, tight-curled fleece and the sharp sound a well-bucket chain makes as it scrapes on stone. But more than these material things, I know the feelings that flourish in small communities. And I know other kinds of emotional truths that I believe apply across the centuries.

You know, most of my career I wrote about moments in time. All of us have felt one thing or another and it didn't last very long. Now I'm drawing from real experience. It's a huge difference.

I feel that all a writer has is his own experience.

Ultimately, you can only ever write what you know. It's logically and philosophically impossible to write what you don't know.

can only write about what bites you.

I like the idea that Ernest Hemingway always wrote about certain things he knew, he knew the ins and outs, back to fronts of what he was talking about. I love that as an inspiration for myself, to keep it true to what you know. I'm always writing little lines and saving them for later.

The final lesson a writer learns is that everything can nourish the writer.

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

I always try to write about something that's actually happened or it doesn't always have to have happened to me, but it has to have happened at some point. So every single lyric that you hear comes from some kind of story that I've come across in my life. I like to think that that maybe helps me mean it a bit more and if you don't mean it, it ceases to be soul music.

Don’t underestimate this gift of finding a place in the writing world: if you really work at describing creatively on paper the truth as you understand it, as you have experienced it, with the people or material who are in you, who are asking that you help them get written, you will come to a secret feeling of honor.

Nothing I ever wrote had a message. It was just my own personal experience.

Largely I write from life. ... I write from what happens to me. Mostly about love. People notice the other stuff more but I write mostly about love.