Henning Mankell Quotes

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

I started writing my own things when I was about 8.

Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

I wrote my first short story in third grade.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

One thing I always did in my career was writing. I always was writing. I was trying to create things. For myself, for other people.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.

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

When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.

Each book first begins with a little idea.

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 was so in love with books from as early as I remember that it seemed a natural step to want to create them. And so I just wanted to be a writer from a very young age. And I think that the lies were just a natural side effect of me wanting to tell stories and write them down.

I decided to become an author when my grandmother taught me to write, when I was six. I can still recall the sensation of being able to turn words into stories. It was a miracle.

I think the reason I'm a writer is because first, I was a reader. I loved to read. I read a lot of adventure stories and mystery books, and I have wonderful memories of my mom reading picture books aloud to me. I learned that words are powerful.

I started to read at a very early age, and I just thought that books and reading were really the most wonderful thing that life had to offer. I think I wrote my very first piece of fiction at the age of 12, but then I didn't write any more for quite a long time.

Authors are ordinary people who usually start to live apart, in the imagination, because they don't fit in with normal, healthy people.

Literature has always been the greatest fuel for my imagination.

Learned to read, and for a while as a kid, you think books are just leaves on trees. Then suddenly, you think a human being is making that, and maybe you could do that.

When people ask me for secrets to writing, I say, 'Read to write.'

I wrote my first play when I was eight. It was about a queen, and I - of course! - was the queen.

I'm constantly creating and writing.

I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.