Becky Albertalli Quotes

You don't know what you need when you're a young writer. You can get small slivers of critical input, advice, comments, but if you're deep in the perplexity of your own process, as you should be, sorting it out in your own way, nothing is going to guide you more than small gestures of encouragement.

If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn.

I'm fully conscious of the fact that I wouldn't be the writer that I am without this place, without Vermont College.

Working with great writers can be humbling and frightening, but it can also change you for good, forever.

There's no path to being a writer that's applicable to everyone. Some young writers have the fortitude to work in a vacuum. For me, it was important to have some sense that my failures weren't unique.

I started creative writing classes at Aberdeen Central Library, and the writer-in-residence there, Todd McEwen, encouraged me a great deal. He showed my stories to his editor, and I thought that was just what happened to everyone who took his classes!

Mr. Olsen in the fifth grade made me want to be a writer. He said, 'Chuck, you do this really well. And this is much better than setting fires, so keep it up.' That made me a writer.

At risk of sounding foully pompous I think that writers' groups are probably very useful at the beginning of a writing career.

I do have the feeling that other writers can't help you with writing. I've gone to writers' conferences and writers' sessions and writers' clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I'm sure it's the wrong direction. It isn't the place where you learn to write.

You don't sit there at twenty-five, unpublished, inexperienced, and respond to Susan Sontag's editorial suggestions like a little snot, rejecting every one of them. But it had a lot to do with the fact that I didn't admire Susan's own fiction.

Other writers know what you're going through, what you're talking about when you write.

I always wanted to write. But honestly I'm glad I didn't do it back when I was twenty-five or so, when it's now clear to me that I was a very poor writer and could've ruined my career before it even started.

I think I'm more sympathetic to writers, to the work and the struggle and the craft of it, than when I was in graduate school at NYU and was very judgmental.

You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

It's true that it's a solitary occupation, but you would be surprised at how much companionship a group of imaginary characters can offer once you get to know them.

I believe I'm a better writer now than I was when I started. I'm grateful that I had good guidance because you don't make it in this business without good editors and a lot of support from your publishers.

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.'

It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected.

I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

Write every day. Make writing a part of your life, but also don't be afraid of learning from others because I think you can. I still try to think of myself as a beginner because that way I can keep on learning.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

Even including myself, my favorite author is Eileen Spinelli, who I happen to live with. She's a terrific writer and has written several of my all-time favorites.

My best advice for writers is: Have your adventures, make your mistakes, and choose your friends poorly - all these make for great stories.