Lloyd Alexander Quotes

Who learns most from a good book is the author.

I used to think that when I finished a book, I was finished with it. But it's like a wonderful Hydra. Every time a head disappears, more heads appear, so I will be writing for the rest of my life. The more books I write, the more books I find that I still have to write about. I use it like an inspiration, and that's wonderful.

I guess I feel it's funny to be looked to for advice on writing when I am still taking in so much from other people.

Most everything that happens to me in any significant sense finds its way into my fiction.

You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

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

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

As a child, I amused myself by making up stories. I'd lie in bed when I was supposed to be sleeping and imagine other lands where people were doing fascinating things. By fifth grade, I knew I wanted to be a writer, but it took several more decades to really find my way as an author.

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

If you're a writer, you know there are ways in which we don't know what we're doing at all. We're working out mysteries in a sort of poetic realm, and hoping that if a story is honest, if you're dragging the deep truth out of yourself, then something good and profound might come out of it.

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.

I must say, it was a lot easier writing novels than I thought it would be. I think it's because I'm a novelist at heart, and it took me a while to figure that out.

I didn't know I was gonna be a writer when I started out.

Probably when I was about 16 or 17 I started writing. I wouldn't call it poetry, even though I've referred to it as poetry a couple times. But I don't think that's right. It was more scribblings and stream of consciousness.

You don't know what you need when you're a young writer. You can get small slivers of critical input, advice, comments, but if you're deep in the perplexity of your own process, as you should be, sorting it out in your own way, nothing is going to guide you more than small gestures of encouragement.

Once I started writing, I realized just how much I really enjoyed it. I was kinda good at it, so I kept at it.

I'm not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don't always know what I'm feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot - like it's coming from somewhere else.

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.

I tend to write longer narrative pieces after I've finished writing a novel - when the fiction's finished and put away, and I have a chance to take all the ideas that are buried inside of my novels and work with them directly.

I've never written anything that hasn't been in my mind for a long time - seven or eight years.

The job of the writer is to look at where he is now and make some sort of emotional sense of it, not only for that moment but for years to come.

I think you have to learn for yourself how to write. I'm slightly mystified by creative writing courses - God love them - because I can't understand how you can explain a process that I find so baffling.

I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human.