Greg van Eekhout Quotes

I may well do some more polemical writing, if a subject that fires me up comes along. Apart from that possibility, I would like to continue to tell stories so long as I have stories to tell.

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.

That has to remain the principal reason for doing it, doesn't it? I know it's possible to write for money, and many very good writers have done so. But for me, it has to remain the principal thing that I actually want to do the writing.

Before I published anything, I dreamed of publication, but I didn't actually write for it. I imagined that writing for an audience was something for fancier people. I aspired, but mostly I wrote for myself. I wrote because it made me happy.

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

I'm first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can't say why I'm one.

I think the fundamental thing about writing fiction is that you write what interests you and what inspires you. It can't be forced. I see no need to write about anything else or any other type of world.

I like to write and that's why I write. I don't think about how much the book will sell.

You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.

And there are people who want to be writers because they love to write. And they care.

I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk.

You can't learn to write in college. It's a very bad place for writers because the teachers always think they know more than you do - and they don't. They have prejudices. They may like Henry James, but what if you don't want to write like Henry James? They may like John Irving, for instance, who's the bore of all time.

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

I think I became a writer because of my love of stories and an inability to stop asking, 'What if?'

I was always meant to be a writer. I've felt that way since I was a child.

Well, I always wanted to write from the time I was very little, and my mother encouraged me. She wrote a journal from the time she was 15 up until about the age of 76.

I'm not sure if I always wanted to be a writer, but I was always writing.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

I was one of those kids who always wrote.

Writing was my route to creative expression, and I needed to write about the things that interested me.

I do have fun writing, and a long time ago, I told myself, 'You got to have fun at this, or it'll drive you nuts.'

The whole point of writing is to have something in your gut or in your soul or in your mind that's burning to be written.

I tell people you should write what you love to read because that's where your passion is.