Jesse Kellerman Quotes

Every writer dreams of writing a book that will touch people.

The only story that seems worth writing is a cry, a shot, a scream. A story should break the reader's heart.

Once we start hitting lyrical themes that can whack you from all these different perspectives, we know we're onto something special.

I didn't get into writing to make money or get famous or any of that. I got into it to hit hearts, and man, when I get letters not just from the soldiers but from their kids, especially their kids, it makes it all worthwhile.

I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.

My idea of art is, you write something that makes people feel so strongly that they get some conviction about who they want to be or what they want to do. It's morally useful not in a political way, but it makes your heart bigger; it's emotionally and spiritually empowering.

I can't imagine a more fulfilling thing for a writer than that you've made a strong impact on the lives of other people. Just because I've heard it before does not mean I don't want to hear it one more time.

I want all my books to provoke some kind of response in the reader, to make them think something or feel something or both, and for that to become a part of them and work into their own lives.

When poetry is on the money, 12 words can slay you. I admire that greatly.

When someone writes to tell me something I've written made them laugh or cry, I've done my job and done it well. The rest is all semantics.

If you write something, and you believe in it, you'd like to see sixty million people moved by it.

I love reading books that can break my heart.

I've had so many experiences with film or musicals or books where I just walk away changed in some way. One of the things that makes me want to be a writer is to pour my heart into something and hope that I can affect someone in that same way.

The thing to remember when you're writing is, it's not whether or not what you put on paper is true. It's whether it wakes a truth in your reader.

I don't want to do the type of writing where I recite biography, parentage and education. I want to rise up from the words on the page and do something, hurt someone.

Life is sad enough without people writing sad books.

What lasts in the reader's mind is not the phrase but the effect the phrase created: laughter, tears, pain, joy. If the phrase is not affecting the reader, what's it doing there? Make it do its job or cut it without mercy or remorse.

The bigger the issue, the smaller you write. Remember that. You don't write about the horrors of war. No. You write about a kid's burnt socks lying on the road. You pick the smallest manageable part of the big thing, and you work off the resonance.

I think that in order to write really well and convincingly, one must be somewhat poisoned by emotion.

Your writing", she said to me, "it's so raw. It's like a sledgehammer, and yet it has humor and tenderness. . . .

The things I like to find in a story are punch and poetry.

All along, my mantra was: Don't write unless it contributes to the emotion, and do anything you do in service of the emotion only.

The success of the poem is determined not by how much the poet felt in writing it, but by how much the reader feels in reading it.

Information is floating around really fast. I write something, or a piece of my music comes out and I see people writing about it on the Internet as if I'm having a conversation with them. We've never met, but somehow, my music is communicating something to them. Very often, it really makes them feel something.

It's far easier to write why something is terrible than why it's good. If you're reviewing a film and you decide "This is a movie I don't like," basically you can take every element of the film and find the obvious flaw, or argue that it seems ridiculous, or like a parody of itself, or that it's not as good as something similar that was done in a previous film. What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive.