Jennifer Westfeldt Quotes

I always found very strong images for my songwriting in New York.

I'd waste a holiday trying to set a story in this new place I'd visit, whereas I would never write a story about Indianapolis.

London has always provided the landscape for my imagination. It becomes a character - a living being - within each of my books.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I could come up with 50 stories that I am thinking about.

New York's home. It's everything I'd want it to be. It's the most inspiring city I've ever been to, and I haven't been everywhere in the world, but I've been to quite a few places.

I think that one of the things you have to do to become a storyteller is spend a lot of time reading stories.

I always had stories inside my head and one day I just decided to start writing them down. I didn't actually decide.

Stories have a richness that goes way beyond fact. My writing knows more than I know. What a writer must do is listen to her book. It might take you where you don't expect to go.

I'm trying to do what Frank O'Hara did and remind myself there there's a lot of good stuff. I write about New York for my own mental health.

If as a child I had written a story, the best story that I could imagine, I would have written as indeed is happening to me.

Daydreaming had started me on the way; but story writing once I was truly in its grip, took me and shook me awake.

If there is a magic in story writing, and I am convinced there is, no one has ever been able to reduce it to a recipe that can be passed from one person to another.

Part of my job as Children's Laureate is to visit schools and talk about my love of books and stories and encourage them all to do it as well - to read, to write, to never be afraid of their own voice. Because we all have something to say.

I just want to sit in my room and write books.

An urban novelist never minds a little decay.

There are a few really fantastic stories left, and that kind of gives you some inspiration to find even new ones.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

I feel so at home in New York that I don't have the urge to write about it.

What inspired me to become an author? I think it was the snow in New York. I looked out the window and I said, 'Well, I have to get dressed every morning to go to teach, but if I write a book, I can stay home in my bathrobe, eat candy corn.'

When I was about eight, I realised the person whose name was on the book got money for it, and it seemed almost too good to be true that you could get paid for making things up.

One thing I always did in my career was writing. I always was writing. I was trying to create things. For myself, for other people.

Any excuse to live in New York and do art. Has to be one of the most rewarding experiences in the world.

I loved stories as a kid, both being read to me and enjoying on my own. All these stories inspired my imagination, and that's what I have always aimed at doing for my readers: ignite their imaginations.