Sarah Dessen Quotes

I think anything that anyone writes that's any good is going to have a lot of autobiography.

I don't know anyone who is a writer who isn't influenced by the relationships in their life.

I still have a lot of the stories I wrote in high school. Hand wrote... a number of them are in purple ink, rendering them illegible, a fact we should probably be forever thankful for.

I remember my father banging away on an IBM Selectric in the garage. He wrote his first novels on that machine. I remember its pebbly surface, its cold heft. It made its mark, literally and violently.

I think I started writing because no one had ever told me you can write about the things you know in a musical. They don't have to come from some far off place.

All of my stories, they don't come from my high school experience, but they're definitely based on things that happened to me in high school, or things that happened to friends of mine, or things that I wish had happened to me.

Right away, I knew I didn't want to have that look of other guys with long hair and bell-bottom pants, because everybody else had that look. I kind of adopted my boarding-school look, which made me stand out. Then the next thing you know, the first song on my first record is a song called "School Days." It's about going to the boarding school I went to. So then I just started to write about myself. The very first song I ever wrote was about a guy I met in a boatyard that we were working in. So I've always had this thing about sticking to more or less what I knew.

I wanted to write stories I wanted to read, that I and my friends related to.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

One thing I always did in my career was writing. I always was writing. I was trying to create things. For myself, for other people.

My aunt got me interested in journalism - she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, 'Play like you're a writer.'

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 tell people you should write what you love to read because that's where your passion is.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

At a certain moment, I decided to write a story. I had no more small children to tell them stories.

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday.

As an author, I've never forgotten how to daydream.

To be a novelist, all I need is a pen and a piece of paper.

I wrote 'Marvels,' which was about a guy who had two daughters, and I wrote 'Astro City Volume 2 #1,' which was about a guy who had two daughters. In both cases, about a year and a half or two years apart. And then after that, I had two daughters, about a year and a half or two years apart.

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

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

When I was around eight, I learned how to touch-type at school, and I received a computer as a present. I started writing plays, and for many years I thought I would be a playwright.

So when I write characters and situations and relationships, I try to sort of utilize what I know about the world, limited as it is, and what I hear from my friends and see with my relatives.