Kevin Barry Quotes

You sort of suspect if a book's fun to write, it will be fun to read.

Forget market or publishers or whatever. Just write with fire and joy, and in my own experience, those are the stories of mine people have wanted to read.

'Where'd You Go, Bernadette' was surprisingly easy and fun to write because I was feeling such strong emotions.

There are many people who say, 'I write for myself.' I think that if you write and publish, then you write for your readers, not just for yourself. Many writers say that they write to be loved. I place myself among those writers.

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 do have to earn a living, so I'm conscious of probable reactions from readers, but the most important one is still the awareness that if I'm not enjoying a story, the reader won't either.

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.

Music is definitely influential on how I approach my scenes.

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

I'm always trying. Between every book, I think, 'Well now, it's time to get down to the serious stuff.'

I don't think anyone does anything from happiness. Happiness is such a good state, it doesn't need to be creative. You're not creative from happiness, you're just happy. You're creative when you're miserable and depressed. You find the key to transform things. Happiness does not need to transform.

The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread. The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.

Writing cannot be done in a state of desirelessness.

As a writer, I'm too busy and worried to experience the delight while composing my own work, although, of course, I hope a reader will find something of it when the work is complete. But I do try to figure out where in their experiences certain characters of mine, who are not necessarily readers, and certainly not writers or artists, find an equivalent sensation: of delight, of astonishment, of whatever it is that briefly - and brevity seems essential - reassures us, connects us, sends a shiver of inarticulate recognition down our spines: Oh, yes: life.

I stay away from the writing part because I think that if it sticks, it sticks. You just know it. The stuff that doesn't stick, goes away. The stuff that propels you forward, you can see it in your partner's eyes.

Interest is never enough. If it doesn't haunt you, you'll never write it well. What haunts and obsesses you may, with luck and labour, interest your readers. What merely interests you is sure to bore them.

If you wait for inspiration, you're not a writer, but a waiter.

Love lift us up where we belong.

People say you make your best work when in despair, but I think happiness is a good place to write from.

My writing is of a very different kind from anything I've heard about. All this mythological material is out there, a big gathering of stuff, and I have been reading it for some forty- or fifty-odd years. There are various ways of handling that. The most common is to put the material together and publish a scholarly book about it. But when I'm writing, I try to get a sense of an experiential relationship to the material. In fact, I can't write unless that happens ... I don't write unless the stuff is really working on me, and my selection of material depends on what works.

There are days when the result is so bad that no fewer than five revisions are required. In contrast, when I'm greatly inspired, only four revisions are needed.

Music’s the soundtrack of my life and has been since I was a teenager. There’s always music. If I’m not playing it, I’m listening to it. With my writing... sometimes it inspires a story, sometimes it highlights something I’m working on, sometimes it simply helps me stay in the narrative mood.

Don't wait for the muse. She has a lousy work ethic. Writers just write.

Creativity is connected to your passion, that light inside you that drives you. That joy that comes when you do something you love. That small voice that tells you, 'I like this. Do this again. You are good at it. Keep going.' That is the juicy stuff that lubricates our lives and helps us feel less alone in the world.

To say, "Well, I write when I really get into it" is a bunch of bull. Put the paper in the typewriter, stare at it a long time, get snowblindness if you have to, but write something.