Markus Zusak Quotes

When you're editing, you want to be the perfect appreciator, not another writer.

It's tough to fully believe in yourself sometimes.

My writing is progressing slowly, but at least it's moving forward. I'm sure that's the case. The only problem is that I'm never absolutely certain that what I've written is any good.

Every really good book was written a little at a time, over time, in tremendous confusion and doubt.

Sometimes I panic and think I can't really write.

We may not ever fully understand why God allows the suffering that devastates our lives. We may not ever find the right answers to how we'll dig ourselves out.

When I started out, I didn't know if I was ever going to make a movie.

It's hard to be an artist. It's hard to be anything. It's hard to be.

Doubt is the enemy of creativeness.

Maybe writing can't be taught, but editing can be taught—prayer, fasting and self-mutilation.

I'm not a very methodologically pure actor. Almost every time that I start, I feel completely at sea. Always at the beginning I feel like a fraud, really, because I'm never sure how to get started.

In explaining the growth of his faith, psychiatrist Gerald May writes, "I know that God is loving and that God’s loving is trustworthy. I know this directly, through the experience of my life. There have been plenty of times of doubt, especially when I used to believe that trusting God's goodness meant I would not be hurt. But having been hurt quite a bit, I know God's goodness goes deeper than all pleasure and pain it embraces them both." Ruthless Trust, pg 22

For every mother who ever cursed God for her child dead in the road, for every father who ever cursed the man who sent him away from the factory with no job, for every child who was ever born to pain and asked why, this is the answer. Our lives are like these things I build. Sometimes they fall down for a reason, sometimes they fall down for no reason at all.

Fear, fear, breeds hopelessness. When you're afraid, you don't know what to believe in, you don't know what to hold on to. You're struggling to find something to believe in.

My mother always tells me, "Fear isn't from God," and I believe that. But sometimes, I wonder whether I'll be able step into the shoes that God has prepared for me.

Doubt is the big machine. It grinds up the delusions of women and men.

Dear Lord,” she said in a strangled whisper. “I can bear it for a while...but please don't let it hurt forever.

What did I really think fifteen years ago? A nonbeliever, I felt guilty in the midst of all those believers. And since it seemed to me that they were in the right, I decided to believe, as you might decide to take an aspirin: It can't hurt and you might get better.

I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.

My doubts stand in a circle around every word, I see them before I see the word, but what then! I do not see the word at all, I invent it.

There's something paralyzing about being a writer that you have to escape. I don't want to think of myself as a guy who's written a bunch of books. The 26 letters distance us from our own hesitations and they make us sound as if we know what we're doing. We know grammar, we know prose, but actually we're all just struggling in the dark, really.

Spontaneous is what you get after the seventeenth draft.

I am certainly not regenerating French art, but am struggling hard to accomplish something on an unlucky piece of paper which has done me no harm at all, and on which, believe me, I am doing nothing that is good... I hope things will improve eventually; as it is, I am pretty wretched.

If it felt good, you didn't push hard enough. It's supposed to hurt like hell.