Adam Rapp Quotes

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

When you write, you hear the characters speaking to you as you take dictation from what they say. And obviously, they had particular personalities when you hear them.

For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.

I write the story as it comes to me - YA is my natural voice, not a conscious choice.

It's been a while since I've written a novel aimed at the adult market, but I never sit down and say to myself, 'Okay, now I'm going to write something for us old folks.' I get gripped by an idea, and I go where the idea takes me.

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.

I just knew there were stories I wanted to tell.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

First, I would find an object which I would think is suitable for my characters and stories, then write about it, and in the end, I ended up with a house full of thousands of objects.

I just let the character speak to me and things appear.

So many stories, and to choose which ones to tell and how to tell them. The words, they will tap me on the shoulder and they will speak to me: 'Tell me! Tell me!' The stories choose me.

If you're a writer, you know that the stories don't come to you - you have to go looking for them. The old men in the lobby: that's where the stories were.

I find that it's really important for me to imagine characters and situations. That allows me a lot of freedom.

I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

I think of myself as a storyteller, and that is it.

When I started writing 'A Million Little Pieces,' I felt like it was the right story with the style I had been looking for, and I just kept going.

It would have been very easy to drift into writing a non-fiction book so by taking it away from Nottingham I forced myself to imagine much more of it.

When I am writing, I'm very much on the ground, on the same ground my characters are treading.

By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.

See, what I don't like listening to is when writers go, 'And then the person cries.' 'Or the person does this.' It's there, but it's not the Bible. I wait and see what happens to me on the day.

Once I started to value and respect my characters, I could really hear them. I just let them start talking.