Garry Wills Quotes

I don't write for an audience, I don't think whether my book will sell, I don't sell it before I finish writing it.

I never have an intended audience. I just write, you know.

I write what I write.

When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.

I can only say that I myself wrote always as I wished, without a tremendous desire to find the latest thing possible.

I don't think you can write from a reactive place. I think you just write the thing you want to write about, and if other people are writing about it, that doesn't really come to bear on what you want to do.

I prefer writing originals.

I guess I could say that I pursue questions that interest me in ways that interest me on the page, but that's awfully vague.

I tell the stories that are of interest to me.

As a novelist, you have to be free. Books can't be an act of filial duty.

All my books are accidental books - they come from reacting to things and thinking about things and engaging in a real way. They are not about, 'Oh, did it get a good review in the Guardian?' I don't care.

Don't write your books for people who won't like them. Give yourself wholly to the kind of book you want to write, and don't try to please readers who like something different.

I love to write. I used to be a math teacher. And I like the idea that other people could write about the same subjects, but no one would write it just the way I do. It's very individual: a child could write the same story as somebody else, but it wouldn't come out the same.

This is not Tolstoy. I don't want to know what critics and professors think of what I'm writing. It might hurt my feelings.

I just write books, and I do it without any notion of what I should do or shouldn't do.

While I do, of course, now feel the pressure having had books that have been very successful, I just know I have to concentrate on writing for myself. I can't worry about genres or markets or what might be commercial or not. That never works.

I don't have any sense of an audience when I'm writing. I don't consider the audience. Because all I'm interested in is the problem on the page.

No book that is written for an external purpose is going to be a passionately felt book for the writer or the reader. I don't see the point in doing that.

As an artist, I want to interpret my feelings - not run across the street and ask what my mother thinks.

I'm really just trying... to write what feels true to me. I don't think about a lofty responsibility. I think I'd be paralyzed by that. Like any of my male colleagues, I'm writing the stories that interest me in a way that feels true to me.

Nothing beats novel writing because it's complete expression of you. You just control everything. Not even a movie director has that level of control.

But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that.

I think that the practice of writing every day was what made me remember that writing doesn't have anything to do with publishing books. It can be totally separate and private - a comforting thought.

I started writing more with my voice in mind.

If I haven't any talent for writing books or newspaper articles, well, then I can always write for myself.