Jonathan Maberry Quotes

I'm not a dedicated writer in the sense of Stephen King.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

I think the few writers who influenced me most in writing short stories are Alice Munro and Grace Paley. They're very different, and I can't do what they do, but reading them gives me hope that I'll learn something from them.

Nora Roberts, Stephen King, Lee Child and George R. R. Martin write wildly different books. Their writing, plotting and styles have little or nothing in common. But they all write books and characters that readers find appealing.

If you have some natural talent and really want to write, you should read the books of someone who's very successful in your genre. You don't want to plagiarize, but you want to learn from that author.

I'm drawn to writers with skill sets I don't have.

I don't really read Stephen King - I just can't read scary things because it stays with me too long - but I truly liked his memoir of the craft of writing.

Just as I could tell you about my first Andre Norton novel or my first L'Engle or my first Asimov, I could write a paragraph about how each of these writers influenced me, my writing, and my thoughts, and do to this day.

I've been writing for a long time.

I don't know if I want to be a writer.

When I close my eyes and think of a writer, I don't imagine him or her as someone who is sitting above me on a pedestal, blindfolded, holding the scales of justice in one hand! No, I see sentences.

I always, always wanted to be a writer.

I never took a writing class.

Every writer should be able to write anything if you do the research and you're sensitive enough to ask the questions.

I loved writing the Spellman novels, but I never had any plan to only write in one genre.

When you've written long enough, you see that there's a common theme in your work.

I love writing. I really look up to Lena Dunham, who writes and directs her show. That's something I might want to do when I'm older.

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

I can't write unless I've got the voice for a character.

That's the thing about writing for a lot of the villains is that, as a writer, you kind of have to put the best part of your own personality aside and instead focus on whatever little strange quirks you may have in your personality.

I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.

If you're mostly a writer - if your point of departure is writing something - which for a writer/director is sort of where you start, you're really influenced by the writers you love one way or another.

The things I want to do mostly involve writing.

I follow only one rule in my writing, and that is to be interesting. If the story is interesting to you, the writer, then it will probably be interesting to somebody else.

It really helped me as a writer to understand how other writers think.