Wendy Cope Quotes

I have this theory that anything that happens to you that leaves you alive and intact can be used somewhere in your writing.

I never regret things. It's a really dangerous thing to say, but for anyone involved in the arts, the bad things that happen make for good material. It's not a comfortable truth, but it is true.

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.

I'm a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

Sometimes I'm asked if I do research for my stories. The answer is yes and no. No, in the sense that I seldom plow through books at the library to gather material. Yes, in the sense that the first fifteen years of my life turned out to be one big research project.

All experience helps when you write.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

People inspire me to write, the good ones and the bad ones.

I take my inspiration for the song writing from little experiences, not even if I've experienced them myself but say if something has made me sad, I will use that emotion. I just use everyday life and write about it.

I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.

My writing has a lot to do with who I am, and what my life is like, and my relationships to people.

It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected.

I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel.

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

I love sitting at my desk and facing a quiet day with a pen in my hand, and putting myself into a story. It's kind of weird, isn't it? I mean, to absent myself from real life and make up stories is strange, but I started doing this when I was ten years old. It was all I wanted to do.

I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.

It's good to have a foothold in reality, a base somewhere that's always been a base. Sharman Macdonald once said she needs life to write; she can't write if she's just in theatre all the time. I'm the same way, I think. I've always felt that if my life was all about the job, I wouldn't be so good at the job.

Any experience that isn't fun is probably something I will at least use in my writing someday.

Every writer I know has trouble writing.