Kelley Armstrong Quotes

I have no idea why I write. The old standards are: I like to express my feelings, stretch my imagination, earn money.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

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'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Now I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am.

I'm not sure there are too many people who write what I write.

Richard Hugo taught me that anyone with a desire to write, an ear for language and a bit of imagination could become a writer. He also, in a way, gave me permission to write about northern Montana.

Ultimately, you've got to have something to say, so a writer should continue learning things throughout life. But I don't think education makes one a writer.

I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.

You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

Write the best book you can, the one that demands to be written, no matter what genre it is. Even a trend the trades tell you has gone stale can be revitalized by a superb piece of writing. It'll never be revitalized by someone jumping on a trend bandwagon.

I've always liked new writing.

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

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

I write all the time - I write poetry, I love to write.

I think I became a writer because of my love of stories and an inability to stop asking, 'What if?'

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.

I was one of those kids who always wrote.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go AWOL, and then I've nothing to write.

I might be into writing... I'd like to try it someday. I always come up with some good ideas.

I don't even know how to define myself. I'm a person who writes. It's something I enjoy, and hopefully people enjoy it as well.

That is how you get to be a writer, incidentally: you feel somehow marginal, somehow slightly off-balance all the time.