Christopher Koch Quotes

I was kind of an outsider growing up, and I preferred reading to being with other kids. When I was about seven, I started to write my own books. I never thought of myself as wanting to be a writer - I just was one.

I didn't write anything at all except book reports until I was in seventh grade, and then I wrote mostly poetry for myself.

I learnt to love reading. And then I started scribbling stories, and I liked that even more.

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

I started writing for myself because I know how to write for myself. I know how to show what I can do.

Since the age of 11, I have loved writing poems and fragments from my life.

I find myself really feeling like it's possible that maybe the greater contribution I'm going to be able to make through this next phase of my life might be as a writer writing wonderful parts for women, or even writing wonderful parts for myself, you know?

I always wrote little things when I was younger. My first opus was a book of poems put down in a spiral notebook at five or six, handsomely accompanied by crayon illustrations.

I could read at a very early age and I loved stories, losing myself in stories, novels.

I never thought I'd be a writer. I never thought I'd be able to read a book, let alone write one. So if books like this inspire kids to write, or even read a whole book, I think it's good.

I want to see children curled up with books, finding an awareness of themselves as they discover other people's thoughts. I want them to make the connection that books are people's stories, that writing is talking on paper, and I want them to write their own stories. I'd like my books to provide that connection for them.

I love to read poetry but I haven't written anything that I'm willing to show anybody.

Some people say, 'Write what you know.' My thing is, 'Write what scares you.'

I began to imitate what I was reading, and I started to become a poet, even though what I was writing were not good poems.

Writing gives me the opportunity to explore ideas, play with language, solve problems, use my imagination, and draw on my own childhood.

I was passionate about reading from an early age, and I would always be carrying a different book each week.

I read less of everything now. With only fond memories of others' work, it will be interesting to give my own journal writing a try now.

I've been a story-teller all my life but I realized it only recently.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

Even though I was a reluctant reader in junior high and high school, I found myself writing poems in the back of class.

In my late teenage years, I developed a real passion for it, and wrote a lot of poetry.

Mr. Olsen in the fifth grade made me want to be a writer. He said, 'Chuck, you do this really well. And this is much better than setting fires, so keep it up.' That made me a writer.

The only time I felt I was different was when one of my friends said, 'I hate reading' and I stared at her like, 'What kind of an alien creature are you?!' Because it was so incomprehensible to me that someone could dislike reading! That really started my desire to help other children love reading and writing.

I think the only reason I wanted to do modeling, really, was because I knew I wasn't ready to act; I knew I didn't have enough life experience, and I knew that doing photo shoots was a way of acting. Playing a character each shoot and being able to just emerge yourself in these awkward experiences - it was amazing.

I've always been a reader and a writer.