Elizabeth Gilbert Quotes

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

I feel like reading really defined me as a writer because I lived my life outside of my own body for so much of my life and I loved it. I've always been a reader. I think living all those stories served me to naturally take that next step to creating.

So, the combination of looking at lots of different people and how they react to each other and how they relate to each other and waiting for that inspiration is the thing that allows me to keep writing.

I get my inspiration from looking at the world and paying attention to people and just looking closely. Also from reading. I get so much inspiration from other authors.

Reading is No. 1 - I have to read, or I can't write.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

A writer is like a bag lady going through life with a sack and a pointed stick collecting stuff.

I'm a writer and writers either have good memories or nothing at all.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

You have to have heart's passion to write a novel.

When I see things in the world that leap out at me, I want to make use of them in fiction. Maybe every writer does that. It just depends on what you claim or appropriate as yours.

Reading is probably what leads most writers to writing.

Quite often, little germs of ideas have come from something that I've observed or someone's told me. The process of it becoming fiction is expanding and extending it: stretching the rubber band of reality.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

When I was young, I assumed that authors must have traveled the world or done exotic things in order to tell great stories.

Live life and write about life. Of the making of many books there is indeed no end, but there are more than enough books about books.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.