Patrick Ness Quotes

I write. This is what I do. My job is to sit down with my vocabulary, select words, and decide what order they should be placed in an attempt to keep someone's attention and perhaps provide them with a laugh or two along the way.

I don't have a style. I just try to write what the story demands.

It is easy to club people together, but there are bound to be influences of authors you've read. I grew up reading fast paced authors such as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer, but to say I'm one of them isn't true; my style is intrinsically my own.

Stephen King has inspired me with his humor and honesty, and his admonition that the author's job is to tell the truth.

When aspiring writers ask me about how they should target their writing, I tell them to pay no attention to that kind of thing. It will restrict you. You will end up falling into stereotypes in an effort to tailor your work toward a perceived genre category.

I focus a little more on pacing when I write books in the young adult category, and of course there's the great American fear of anything sexual, so that's somewhat backed off in YA.

I don't really do themes. I might accidentally, but themes are an emergent phenomena of the writing of the book, of just trying to get a story out there.

I write the way I write.

It's - I write the books and let the market find who reads it. I guess a young adult is anywhere from ten to fifteen.

I write in a pretty straightforward way. I kind of sit down at page one and start writing.

I don't know if there is any one secret to successful writing, but one important step is to move beyond imitation and discover what you can write that no one else can - that is, find out who you are and write that in an appropriate narrative and style.

In TV writing, I felt like Gulliver being tied down by the Lilliputians. There's so much more freedom in fiction writing.

I would not have so many scripts being driven by demographics. The play's the thing - not the 18-35 year old male age group.

But I don't sit down and think: this is meant for children.

Writing is not like acting, where you can pull these little stunts that create a particular effect. Words are all it is about, and the way you use words has to be individual and particular to you.

When I started off with Trainspotting, it was the way the characters came to me. That's how they sounded to me. It seemed pretentious to sound any other way. I wasn't making any kind of political statement.

I don't think I consciously decided to write for the young adult audience; my subconscious decided for me.

It's hard to write an Evan Hunter novel because I really am starting from scratch. I'm assuming a new voice each time. The McBain voice is set.

A baby writer should take inspiration from her predecessors but also find ways to tell her own stories in her own way.

People wanted to get me published, and my early work was so weird that they weren't getting anywhere. I thought, okay, I'll do something that's just a tad more normal.

In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.

For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.

Writing in another person's voice is a skill you have to develop when you're working on someone else's show. But if you can maintain your perspective, that's what will make you stand out.

My writing did turn out to be quite intact, as it has all my experiences gathered at one place.

I'm certainly no Bruce Springsteen in terms of being a storyteller, but I'm trying to get a better handle on it and not always go after it from an autobiographical standpoint.