Lydia Hearst Quotes

My heroes were never scientists. They were Graham Greene and Christopher Isherwood, you know, good writers.

I want to be one of those serious, moody writers.

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.

I write novels and other things.

I write 'by the seat of my pants.' I love to do research. I am inspired by contemporary writers and contemporary events. I live in the real world.

I shall be but a shrimp of an author.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

I was a huge rereader, so I've read all the Chronicles of Narnia, at minimum, 13 times each. In reading that series, I realized that someone had written those books, and that was that person's job. And I thought, 'That is the job for me. That is the job I'm going to have when I grow up.'

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

I was given the ability to create stories and characters. That's my part of the long chain of writers, publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, and a host of others who eventually deliver literature to the world. I want to do for others what Eudora Welty did for me.

The funny thing about writing is I think a lot of people assume that you're sitting in a garret with a quill pen for hour after hour.

I'm a writer, not a genre.

'Dandelion Wine' became one of the few books that I returned to time and again, and while not anywhere near the story crafter as Mr. Bradbury, I hope I managed to absorb by osmosis some of his techniques.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

I think I'm a born storyteller. Inspiration is all around me. I can read a newspaper article and come up with an idea for a book.

My books always begin with a sentence and an image - not necessarily connected.

When I write, I imagine places more than people.

As a younger person, I was obsessed with Ray Bradbury, and I think his stories did more to shape me as a storyteller than anybody else - even though, when I read them now, a lot of them seem overly sentimental. But that's probably the writer that I've thought about the most, even though I don't necessarily like a lot of his work.

I'd have liked to have been another Faulkner, of course.

You don't have to go fight bulls in Spain like Hemingway to write something great, or go off to war. It's right under your nose.

All my big heroes are literary, writers.

As a kid, I dreamt of becoming a writer. My most exciting pastime was reading novels; in fact, I would read anything I could find.