Marly Youmans Quotes

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.

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

If I examine the circumstances which inspired me to write - and this is not mere self-indulgence, but a desire for accuracy - I see clearly that the starting point of it all for me was war.

So much of my own life inspires what I write. Whether it's work, family, friends, motherhood, I am a writer who tends to write what she knows. In 'Revenge Wears Prada,' a great deal of my own life finds its way into the book.

I did a minor in creative writing in college, but I didn't start writing until I stayed at home with my own children.

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.

Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.

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

I write for kids because I think the most interesting (and most humorous) stories come from people's childhoods. When I was writing 'Diary of a Wimpy Kid,' I had a blast talking on the phone to my younger brother, Patrick, remembering all of the things that happened to our family when we were growing up.

A child's first teacher is its mother.

I have two children myself. I always laugh; they have you playing mothers pretty early, us women. You look at the television, the mothers get younger and younger, and the children get older and older, and you start to wonder when these people had these children. Were they breeding when they were 12?

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

I love babies, and I have my nephews that I love. I have a great mom and she has raised three kids, so if I take lessons from her, I think I'll be great. All my friends have little brothers or sisters.

Whenever I'm writing a book, small details from my life always creep in.

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.

All experience helps when you write.

Good mothers and good fathers and good families don't always have great children.

I wrote my first script, which was 50 pages, at age 15. It was about two brothers in love with the same nurse while they're convalescing in a Civil War hospital.

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

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.

Raising five boys is a handful, trust me.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.

Each time I write a new piece, whether a novel, a picture book, a speech or anything, really, it has so much to do with what I'm going through personally or a problem I'm trying to work out. When I wrote my novel 'Baby,' my three children had all just gone out the door.