Christopher Koch Quotes

To write about a place, you have to live there.

I like to write about wherever I happen to be.

I'd waste a holiday trying to set a story in this new place I'd visit, whereas I would never write a story about Indianapolis.

To me, the contemporary novel suffers from a lack of sense of place - or spirit of place, if you will. It's not important to most writers, I must assume, or they try to research a given background on sabbatical. Not for me. I write about places I've lived long before I ever set pen to paper.

I think that you certainly don't have to be aged and travel the world to write a poem.

I think writers are observers and watchers. We always have our ears open and eyes open, so I might see something in everyday life that inspires me. And I think that's probably more than anything else. Everyday life is where I get my inspiration.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

It's good to have a foothold in reality, a base somewhere that's always been a base. Sharman Macdonald once said she needs life to write; she can't write if she's just in theatre all the time. I'm the same way, I think. I've always felt that if my life was all about the job, I wouldn't be so good at the job.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

I'm writing constantly about all my crazy experiences across the world, so I have a lot of music I've already written.

I think it's important to remember where I began. I know that when I talk to other writers, say, writers from the South or writers from abroad, it's where they begin as children that is important to them.

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

For my first three books the setting (or place if you will) has always been a given - N.J. and the Dominican Republic and some N.Y.C. - so from one perspective you could say that the place in my work always comes first.

The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location.

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

When I write, I imagine places more than people.

I'm a great believer in the novelist being 'on the scene,' reporting, traveling, meeting all sorts of people.

The words come from here. From memories, from dreams, from people I've known. I'm always writing and reflecting on life. I want to suck it all in.

I do have the feeling that other writers can't help you with writing. I've gone to writers' conferences and writers' sessions and writers' clinics, and the more I see of them, the more I'm sure it's the wrong direction. It isn't the place where you learn to write.

I think what happens is that some writers, who are so great in television or whatever, once they become successful, they get out of the loop of real life. It's real hard to draw on something to write.

There are so many fun things that you live that you can write about and people of all ages can connect to.

I always try, if I can, to travel before I start a writing project. For me, travelling is my education. It inspires me, and it clears my mind and allows me to come back with a cleansed palate.

Traveling around, coming down to Florida for a few days, it's fun! You go on the road, you get inspired to write other stuff.

I needed time to stand back and go through a lot more experience in life. Then I have something to write about, joke or to animate.

I write about, more or less, everything I can think of, that is I stretch my imagination as far as it'll go. I am kind of stuck in the middle as far as my life goes, and hence my imagination tends to zero in on things which are indeed in the middle. That is, I don't write about the very rich, who I scarcely know, or the very poor who I don't know very well either.