Carol Shields Quotes

Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

Everyone gets a pencil as a kid, but it doesn't make them all authors or painters or drawers or anything else.

Reason is a fine thing, but it is not the only thing available to a writer. It's just part of the arsenal of many things available to a storyteller. Revelation, for example.

Call it vanity, call it arrogant presumption, call it what you wish, but I would grope for the nearest open grave if I had no newspaper to work for, no need to search for and sometimes find the winged word that just fits, no keen wonder over what each unfolding day may bring.

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.

The coming of the kids hasn't come out in my art yet.

I get so much inspiration from my travels, but I also started an exercise where I write down so many words every week. Then I begin crossing them off. We create a grid of words and also images, but words for me are more ample because you can interpret them your own way.

It's no coincidence that I began writing the day my daughter started school. I knew everything I knew before I began to write, but I was raising two children and didn't have the time to get to the typewriter.

Having kids sets a bomb off in your life. It really makes you examine who you are, what you believe in and what you want to be. And that is magical for creativity.

I love the line of Flaubert about observing things very intensely. I think our duty as writers begins not with our own feelings, but with the powers of observing.

I never stop being a mother and I never stop being an artist. You understand? Which is probably why my kids are so creative, because it's not separated.

Poetry is a release of something previously unknown into the visible. You write to invite that, to make of yourself a gathering of the unexpected and, with luck, of the unexpectable.

Imagination needs to be fed.

Art is a fruit that grows in man, like a fruit on a plant, or a child in its mother's womb.

As long as there are things to wonder about, there are stories to be written about them. That makes me happy, because writing about things seems to be my thing.

I started writing as soon as I started reading.

I'm driven to go out and find new things to write about.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

Yes, I do often write poems from the mind, but I hope I don't ignore feelings and emotions.

I have two young children, and I will say that motherhood is its own peak, just like in the process of writing: one climbs and is continuously moving with each book. Becoming a mother is the greatest connection I've ever felt to being spiritual.

I started writing out all of my feelings, and people asked me, 'Have you ever thought of recording your music?' It was something I'd always thought of, but I'd never really had the confidence.

When you're writing something that is truly original it takes time.

Writing has always been an incredible outlet for me to feel like I have a voice, even when sometimes I was the only one reading my work. It has been a way for me to unlock my imagination. That's when the world becomes yours, after all.

I used to spend a lot of time dreaming and writing poetry.

Creativity means to push open the heavy, groaning doorway to life.