Patricia McCormick Quotes

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

A writer should never mark the page with their own tears.

I find writing really difficult - definitely the most difficult of all the things I do.

It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

Until a book starts forming in your head, you always wonder, 'Am I going to be able to do this again?'

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

Unless I'm really uneasy with what I'm writing, I lose interest very quickly.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

If there was anything that I learned with my own writing process, maybe there's too many choices what to write about. Just the amount of subject matter in the world these days; maybe that feels chaotic for me.

I'm one of the lucky writers: plots come easily to me.

I have no literary fears.

I am not - thank heavens - one of those 'driven' writers who spend a fortnight buckled with empty fright over an untouched page only to wake at two in the morning feverish with paragraphs.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

With writing, I love doing it, but there's that love-hate relationship: You're not having a good run, you've hit a wall; it's frustrating.

I always have a story in my head that needs to be written, or at least I think I do. But I usually can't find the time to write it.

I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: 'Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticise them later.' You give this advice but can't always take it.

When I write, I try to think back to what I was afraid of or what was scary to me, and try to put those feelings into books.

If you are a writer you locate yourself behind a wall of silence and no matter what you are doing, driving a car or walking or doing housework you can still be writing, because you have that space.

Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.