Michael Dirda Quotes

There is the great creative part of it. The writing is the best part.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.

I was very happy sitting alone at a dining room table, writing a script.

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.

I have an ideas book at home with far more ideas than I will ever be able to write.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.

You lie awake at 3 in the morning thinking of story ideas. You're online at 8 a.m. on a Sunday or midnight on a Wednesday. It's a job that you never push aside.

The great advantage of being a writer is that you can spy on people. You're there, listening to every word, but part of you is observing. Everything is useful to a writer, you see - every scrap, even the longest and most boring of luncheon parties.

I get to do what I love every day. I get to crawl into someone else's head and I love that.

The nice thing about writing at home is that it's almost as though I'm doing it already. I get out of bed thinking of my work, and I don't have to go anywhere to do it.

The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.

What I often do when I'm writing, if I can't find that story, I go out and I hunt for it.

When someone's a writer, it's very creative and moody, and you think of someone walking around the office in pajamas thinking of ideas.

If you are a writer, or want to be a writer, this is how you spend your days--listening, observing, storing things away, making your isolation pay off. You take home all you've taken in, all that you've overheard, and you turn it into gold. (Or at least you try.)

The story I am writing exists, written in absolutely perfect fashion, some place, in the air. All I must do is find it, and copy it.

I do not understand how on earth you can become a writer without seeing the world.

For a writer it's a dream to sit and watch people as close as possible.

What inspired me to become an author? I think it was the snow in New York. I looked out the window and I said, 'Well, I have to get dressed every morning to go to teach, but if I write a book, I can stay home in my bathrobe, eat candy corn.'

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

You almost have to create situations in order to write about them, so I live in a constant state of self-imposed poverty. I don't want to live any other way.

One thing I always did in my career was writing. I always was writing. I was trying to create things. For myself, for other people.

I got into writing because books and stories were always a big part of my life. I loved listening to them and then reading them, and I loved making them up.

Travelling is difficult, and writers tend to want to stay at home and do their work.