Bella Freud Quotes

There is no such thing as writer's block. There is only not enough information. If you can't write, learn something.

Writing for children is my... that's my medium, you know, and the medium is the picture book, which is a very particular kind of book. I try to give children what I would give anybody, you know. I become interested in something. I find something fascinating. It has to fascinate me, and then I want to give it to them.

The Internet is a limitless library at your fingertips. It's a great place to start with the acquisition of knowledge. My process is to go to a place when I'm writing about it. Nothing captures the essence, feeling and flavor of a place better than when I'm actually there and doing the writing.

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.

No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

Anything you read can influence your work, so I try to read good stuff.

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.

Write a story a great writer would write. Because part of becoming an artist is pushing through all the disbelief of those around you, deciding that you are a writer when you have no idea what a plot is or whether what you've written is any good, or anything.

I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

I lost that excitement I had when I first started out. It was all about the need to just get a job, and so I found the joy again when I was writing Deuce Bigelow. I was laughing so hard and along with my writing partner at the time, simply laughing until we cried.

I was willing to do anything that Chris Carter wrote.

I'm a writer and this is what I love to do.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

If you love something - and there are things that I love - you do want more and more and more of it, but that's not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.

It was kind of enlightening to become a playwright.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

I think people who create and write, it actually does flow-just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It's simple.

I'm so convinced that hiking helps my writing that I recently decided to offer a series of hiking-writing workshops to see if others had the same experience.

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

Well, certainly I don't think that there are very many good writers who don't live without a sense of tension. If they haven't got one immediately available to them, then they usually manage to manufacture it in their private lives.

My new novel 'Red Hook Road' began many years ago as a short article in the newspaper.

The reason there's no modern-day Shakespeare is because he didn't have anything to do except sit in a room with a candle and think.

I wanted to be a writer. I wanted to say something about home.

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.