Cheryl Strayed Quotes

I've always been a reader and a writer.

If I didn't write, I'd be like a duvet cover; I have no other marketable skills.

I say it's easier to write for other people than write for myself.

I hated labels anyway. People didn't fit in slots--prostitute, housewife, saint--like sorting the mail. We were so mutable, fluid with fear and desire, ideals and angles, changeable as water.

I, myself, write to change my life, to make it come out the way I want it to. But other people write for other reasons: to see more closely what it is they are thinking about, what they may be afraid of. Sometimes writers write to solve a problem, to answer their own question. All these reasons are good reasons. And that is the most important thing I'll ever tell you. Maybe it is the most important thing you'll ever hear. Ever.

I am going to tell you a secret. Everything is about wanting. Everything. Things happen because of people wanting. Watch closely, and you’ll see what I mean.

Writing and reading is to me synonymous with existing.

When I want to read something nice, I sit down and write it myself.

Writers are really people who write books not because they are poor, but because they are dissatisfied with the books which they could buy but do not like.

If you don't see the book you want on the shelves, write it.

I felt like I had experienced a lot of things in the first chapter of my life, and I wanted it to inspire and motivate people, so I just started writing.

I still encourage anyone who feels at all compelled to write to do so. I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

People cannot stand the saddest truth I know about the very nature of reading and writing imaginative literature, which is that poetry does not teach us how to talk to other people: it teaches us how to talk to ourselves. What I'm desperately trying to do is to get students to talk to themselves as though they are indeed themselves, and not someone else.

When people use that stream of consciousness, it's kind of just a term they use for anything that looks slightly different on the page.

Thank God for novelists. Thank God there are people willing to write everything down. Otherwise, so much would be forgotten.

To a great extent, I still write for myself, write what amuses me. Fortunately, I have a quirky sort of strange sense of humor that appeals to other people and that's good. I still sort of write for myself though there are some areas of the book I feel I have to put in and I feel I have to deliver.

Anyone can express himself or herself, but what writers and poets want to do in their work, more than simply express themselves, is communicate.

There are many people who get beat up, who suffer, who are victimized, and then they sit down to write and they write crap. How many of these graphic novels over the years are from really talented people? Most of them actually, if you look at them, are self-pitying confessionals about "poor me".

I don't have control over how people choose to perceive me. The only thing I have control over is my writing.

Bookish people, who are often maladroit people, persist in thinking they can master any subtlety so long as it's been shaped into acceptable expository prose.

I guess the important thing for young writers is to read.

Early on, even in college, I figured out that it was just more interesting to me to create content than to write about other people. So that makes it more marketable.

If you want to read a perfect book there is only one way: write it.

I think a diversity of expression can only be good, so I think the more that people write about their experience, use their imagination to deal with their experience, you know, I think that's going to be good for not only for those authors but also for people who are interested in trying to understand it.

Writing is a concentrated form of thinking...a young writer sees that with words he can place himself more clearly into the world. Words on a page, that's all it takes to help him separate himself from the forces around him, streets and people and pressures and feelings. He learns to think about these things, to ride his own sentences into new perceptions.