Sara Gruen Quotes

If you're writing, you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.

When I write, I don't think about messages for my readers.

I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.

When I write, I enjoy myself so much that what is being written really needs no reader.

I don't write for publishers, certainly not for critics, and not for readers, But I am delighted that so many people have found my books enjoyable and want to continue to read them.

I started out life as a writer, and writers write in part because they don't want to talk.

I'm writing what comes into my head, or through me, or from somewhere else, and it is the most extraordinary, exciting thing. I love it, and I'm very greedy, and I really enjoy it!

What I love is the writing, it's not having written. I like the process of it.

I write for the love of writing. If I never published another book, I would still be writing stories.

When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.

But I do not have the reader in mind when I write. No true writer does that.

I don't perceive an audience at all when I write a book. It's pure self-indulgence.

I hadn't ever worked with an 'editor' until I was 26 - although that could be partly chalked up to the MFA vs. NYC thing, where I came up through institutions that encouraged writers to write privately for a long, long time and not sully themselves with concerns about audience or the business side of writing.

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

Expect to be disgusted by your own early work. If writing is your vocation, if you hope that it might be your salvation, push on through the disgust until you find one true sentence, a few words that say more than you expected, something you didn't know until you set it down.

When I sit down to write a book, I don't ask myself, "How many am I going to sell?"

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It's not my business whether people like or dislike it.

All I can do is write about whatever grabs me.

I'm a bore. I save all my energy for my characters.

To a certain extent, just like my children, I nurture my writing until the point when it has to get out and face the outside world, where it takes on a life of its own. That is a purpose of any artist and their art.

When I'm working on one book, part of my imagination is thinking ahead to the next one.

I don't really think about genre. I like to write books that I'd love to read myself.

I'm a working writer; this is my job. So it matters to me that it's good. I sweat over every word. I don't just vomit this stuff up. It's agony. The only thing that comes close is childbirth, except it's like being in labor for eighteen months.

When I lock myself up to write, I cannot allow myself to think about the censor or the reviewer or anyone but my characters and their story!

That's the advantage of being a writer: No matter what happens, as long as you survive it, it goes into the work.