John Ridley Quotes

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

I always knew I was going to grow up to be a storyteller; that's one of the earliest things I remember about myself. There was never a question of me not writing.

I've always been a writer, I've always been a storyteller, but I never thought about screenwriting.

When I was a kid, it never occurred to me that human beings wrote books. It was a kind of cognitive dissonance for me... I just didn't think it was something that people did.

On the whole, stories don't write themselves.

For anyone who is: just keep writing. Keep reading. If you are meant to be a writer, a storyteller, it'll work itself out. You just keep feeding it your energy, and giving it that crucial chance to work itself out. By reading and writing.

I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.

I never started writing because I wanted to write myself stuff. It was really more that I had these stories to tell, and I wanted to work with people that I respected and liked.

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

I'd like to ghost-write Liz Phair's novel. But I don't really know about that. It seems like a dignified thing to segue into as I approach the other side of 45. My hands are just full right now. There's the potential to try to write some kind of biography of Pavement - sort of a cryptic, nonfiction/fiction blowout. The story's never been told well. But that's a lot of inward-gazing that I'm not sure I want to do. I like to look out.

Writing stories, adopting other characters, making up fantastic stories and tales, this is a way of perhaps enhancing who I am. Writing stories takes a commonplace old life and makes it all somehow more interesting. And hopefully I can do that in a way that touches a lot of people in their lives, too.

I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up.

I always wrote. I've written stories since I was 9. We didn't have a computer at home, but my aunt Magda had one. Whenever I'd go to her place, I was in the basement working on her computer, writing stories.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

I'm writing. The pages are starting to stack up. My morale is improving the more I feel like a writer.

I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.

As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that's a disguise for being a writer.

One thing about writing 'The Sarah Silverman Program' was the concern that I don't give myself the best story, you know what I mean?

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

People ask me, 'What do you do?' And I tell them I'm a writer, but always with the silent reservation, 'I am, of course, not really a writer. Hemingway was a writer.'

As a child, I amused myself by making up stories. I'd lie in bed when I was supposed to be sleeping and imagine other lands where people were doing fascinating things. By fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but it took several more decades to really find my way as an author.

Because I'm such a creative person, and I've always got my nose in a book, I suppose it was only a matter of time before non-fiction turned into fiction again. But I never consciously set out to become a writer and I never thought I'd be doing the things I'm doing today.

I never wanted to be anything but a writer, and I never let go of it.