Maurice Sendak Quotes

The writing process isn't something I'm in love with. I'm an illustrator who writes.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

How long does it take to write a good book? All of the years that you've lived.

As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.

And that's why any of my picture books exist: They all seem to be built backwards from a simple, emotionally optimistic story beat.

One of my main decisions when accepting the job of Children's Laureate was that I must continue working on picture books. If I don't write and illustrate for some time, then I begin to question who I am.

There are many challenges I face while working on a book. Working within deadlines and schedules is certainly one of the bigger ones for me. I want to create the best possible book I can for my readers with words and pictures - and that takes time to get it just right.

I love reading and I love thinking - the reason that I love my books so much is that in order to write them I have to read and to think for years at a time about the same period of time.

Creating a book and creating a collection involve a lot of editing.

When I'm writing the text for a book like 'Little White Rabbit,' I read it aloud, alone, in my studio, again and again and again - because the rhythm has to be exactly right. After I get my manuscript to the point where I think it is perfect, I begin to think about what I want the art to look like.

Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that's how I started doing children's books.

Once I have the story in my head, I write it down. The illustrations usually come last.

I'm sure every author has their own process.

Something people say about acting is that acting is listening. But I think that writing is listening, too. That you really have to listen to what are they saying and what they're communicating to you. And so, a lot of it is just getting stuff down.

The best way to learn to write is to read in the genre you might be interested in; then, you need to actually sit down and write. In a lot of cases, the first book you write will not get published. Do not get hung up on that. Start a second book.

To me, writing is a very physical process. I lay out the entire book with the two narratives side by side on my bedroom floor, and just get down on my hands and knees and start looking at it in that physical space. "Does this really follow from this? Should this be here or elsewhere?" I will literally cut the paper into paragraphs. I'll cut it into segments and move the segments around from one narrative to the other until I feel that I've found the natural structure.

It might be more difficult because you haven't got a book or a prop, but for the most part I like to write unpaid... initially and my own stories.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

I'm not particularly inventive. If you left me in а room and told me to write a novel, I wouldn't be able to do it. But if you gave me two years in a public library around the corner, I could. It all comes from sort of mixing the true and the invented. I'm not a fabulist. I'm more of a reporter.

I love the freedom of writing and then I love the realization of directing. I can't favor one or the other. I enjoy both parts of the process.

Writing a book is as different from digital curation as night and day. Digital curation is a series of split-second decisions: good/no good. It can even be done algorithmically. Writing is process-intensive activity.

Writing a film - more precisely, adapting a book into a film - is basically a relentless series of compromises. The skill, the "art," is to make those compromises both artistically valid and essentially your own. . . . It has been said before but is worth reiterating: writing a novel is like swimming in the sea; writing a film is like swimming in the bath.

No two books come out the same way. Some I write by the seat of my pants; others are planned in minute detail.

Every time you finish something ... you figure you've finally learned to write, right? Then you start something else and it turns out you haven't. You have learned how to write that story, or that book, but you haven't learned how to write the next one.