Jess Walter Quotes

I am a writer. It's like a third arm to me.

Writing is an extreme privilege but it's also a gift. It's a gift to yourself and it's a gift of giving a story to someone.

What is writing but an expression of my own life?

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

I have always thought of myself as a writer, only because I need things to direct, and I can't not write the things that I direct.

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

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

For me, life is writing and I can do it anywhere. It doesn't matter where I am. I listen. I write. I live.

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.

If you're writing, you're starting in private. It can really be this amazing, private, freeing experience. Forget that it's for other people - that comes in later.

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.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

The wonderful thing about being a writer is that everything that happens is grist to the mill.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy that kind of process.

Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better.

I always talk to my students about the need to write for the joy of writing. I try to sort of disaggregate the acclaim from the act of writing.

If you give me a typewriter and I'm having a good day, I can write a scene that will astonish its readers. That will perhaps make them laugh, perhaps make them cry - that will have some emotional clout to it. It doesn't cost much to do that.