Laura Lippman Quotes

Of course I write from experience, but I also do write from things that have happened in the world.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

When I write a novel, I have what I think of as an icon that helps get me into the world of the book.

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.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

I think people who write for kids, we have that ability to go back into our own lives.

I really have reached a point where I can write a book about all of this.

I find inspiration in many places. Sometimes music gives me the kernel of a story. Sometimes it's dissatisfaction with the plot of a movie or a book that gets me thinking. Sometimes it's love of a movie or book.

My books come to me in images, and sometimes the image is at the beginning of the book, and sometimes it's simply a flash somewhere in the middle.

Most fiction comes from your experience.

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

The stories that I tell, the topics that I choose to write about, usually are suggested by something that I've done before.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

So much of what I write in fiction is based on true stories.

Whenever I write a novel, most of the time it starts with barest slip of an idea.

I usually am thinking about my next book the second I put the last dot on the previous one that I turn in.

Hands down, the hardest part for me is coming up with an idea. I spend about 14 months writing a book, and that's a lot of hours spent thinking about a single project. I simply have to love the idea. I'll go through dozens of workable ideas until I find the one that lights my fire.

The thing that inspires me most is reading and just observing the people around me. I think those are the two things that make me want to write.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

Few real people appear in my two novels, actually. "Ari" appears on the edge of this book a couple of times - but on the edge, she's never in it, even if she's a determining force from the outside. Everybody in the first book was basically made up, if never from scratch.

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.

I write the books that I'm compelled to and I definitely learn things about the world when I write them, and I hope that other people get something out of them, enjoy them, see the world differently when they're done.

One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mold of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one's personal compost-heap; and my mold is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.

Having written Camp David as a drama, I could see the drama maybe a little more clearly when I wrote the book.

I always think about the books I'm doing in pretty much the same way. I'm simply trying to write that particular novel as well as that particular novel can be written. I want to listen to what it is telling me, trying to figure out what it wants to do as much as what I want to do with it. There's a negotiation that's constant and ongoing between me and the material I'm working with, because I'm trying to listen to it.