Jacqueline Carey Quotes

I feel, as an artist, it's important for me to write, and that's a big part of what my journey is - being able to write my stories and talk about stuff.

It took me eight books to finally be at a point in my career where I could come out with a book and say, 'This is meant to be a funny book,' and we didn't have to make any bones about it.

My first novel, 'John Crow's Devil,' freed me up to write about the past, and 'The Book of Night Women' freed me up to have a book totally based on voice and being very spontaneous.

Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.

I have more to say as a writer than from behind a wok.

I like writing, and I enjoy it. It's painful. You can't get around the pain of writing. I'm still trying to balance on what I think is my creative habit. It varies, but I do know that I need to continue. It helps me with my acting, and the writing helps me be invested in a different way.

I started by writing short stories, but they weren't very good; I tried them on various magazines, and none of them was published. People were nicer then about turning you down, and so I didn't lose heart - I kept on writing and wrote a lot of books, one or two of which I finished, and others I didn't.

Each book I've done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

I was a 'learn by doing' writer - I never took any formal writing classes. So it took a long time to figure things out and find my voice.

My writing became more and more minimalist. In the end, I couldn't write at all. For seven or eight years, I hardly wrote. But then I had a revelation. What if I did the opposite? What if, when a sentence or a scene was bad, I expanded it, and poured in more and more? After I started to do that, I became free in my writing.

I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.

I personally feel I still have so much to learn as a writer; each novel is better than the one before, just because I'm getting better at it.

For everyone I know who is a writer, there was some awkward time in their lives when they had to learn to call themselves one.

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

The biggest sacrifice to me is to not be in an atmosphere where I can keep writing and moving forward.

Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.

Novelists can ask - they can ask for anything - but their books are their answers in advance.

I used to write chronologically when I started, from beginning to end. Eventually I went, 'That's absurd; my heart is in this one scene, therefore I must follow it.'

I'm not a natural writer like, let's say - I'm not talking about Arthur Miller; that's a whole other thing - but let's say Woody Allen. But the more I've written, the more I've found that there is a deep well in me somewhere that wants to express things that I'm not going to find unless I write them myself.

I don't know how I do it, but I've written about everything. I've written about my shoes.

That's what you're looking for as a writer when you're working. You're looking for your own freedom. To lose your inhibition to delve deep into your memory and experiences and life and then to find the prose that will persuade the reader.

'Hill St.' was very good, but it was very impersonal work for me. I wrote about that place as if I was a visitor. It wasn't what my life was like. It was a great place to learn the craft of how to shape a scene, but I wanted a chance to write about more personal themes and obsessions.

I always wanted to be a writer. In the beginning, I thought I had to rewrite 'Gone with the Wind,' but eventually, I found my way and realized that wasn't me.

I definitely still like writing one-liners, but I also think that I've changed a lot in that I've allowed myself freedom to grow.

If I could chat with anyone, it would be Claire Messud, because I think she could tell me how to get better as a writer as I age.