Stephen Adly Guirgis Quotes

Back when I taught middle school and wrote adult mysteries, my students often asked me why I wasn't writing for kids. I never had a good answer for them. It took me a long time to realize they were right.

Writers do draw inspiration from their own lives, which, quite frankly, might be more interesting than fiction.

I want to get within myself and write. I really, really want to write.

I've always written about things that cause me to feel something.

Why my interest in writers? Well, I'm one, and many of my friends are writers. I know what it's like to write. I'm interested in the creative process. I'm fascinated by the disparity between who we are on the outside, and what we have bubbling away inside us.

You've got to live life to write a book about it.

I've always seen writing as a way of telling the truth. For me, writing is about truth. I have always tried to be faithful to my own experience.

If you're going to write about your life, you must write about your life.

Anyone can write your own life story.

I started writing my own things when I was about 8.

I write about what happens to me. It's all there. I couldn't do it any other way.

I like to tell my own story using my personality and my insight, the way I see things.

I want young readers to know that to tell their own story is the most important thing they'll ever do.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

Readers would email me and say, 'Please write a novel about so-and-so,' but it has to come from yourself and not so much from your readership.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

The first audience that you have when writing a book is you.

Anything that I write comes from the soul.

When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.

I do not think writers ought ever to sit down and think they must write about some cause, or theme, or something. If they write about their own experiences, something true is going to emerge.

You write about what you know, and you write about what you want to know.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

I think it's nearly impossible to write something fictional without having it be about yourself in some way or another.

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

As far as writing, it's grown because I've really grown comfortable with who I am.