Amos Lee Quotes

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

I think writers are observers and watchers. We always have our ears open and eyes open, so I might see something in everyday life that inspires me. And I think that's probably more than anything else. Everyday life is where I get my inspiration.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

My aunt got me interested in journalism - she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, 'Play like you're a writer.'

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'm a writer and this is what I love to do.

I started writing when I was about thirteen.

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.

I'm clearly not a writer, but I'm always a fan of them.

I think what happens is that some writers, who are so great in television or whatever, once they become successful, they get out of the loop of real life. It's real hard to draw on something to write.

I think that I had read so much fiction that the craft itself sort of sank into me. I didn't read any 'how to' books or attend any popular-fiction-writing classes or have a critique group. For many years into my writing, I didn't even know another author. For me, a lot of reading was the best teacher.

I've been writing in some way, shape, or form for as long as I can remember.

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

The great fun in my life has been getting up every morning and rushing to the typewriter because some new idea has hit me.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

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.

I don't even know how to define myself. I'm a person who writes. It's something I enjoy, and hopefully people enjoy it as well.

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

Probably I, like a lot of people, became a writer in imitation of or in homage to the books I enjoyed. When you're so captivated by something, you think, could I do that? Hmm, let me try.

I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday.