Jerry Spinelli Quotes

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

I always like to write where I'm at in real life into whatever I'm working on.

Every writer is going to end up drawing from their own experiences in one way or another.

I'm not really an autobiographical writer, though I use lots of stuff from my life to make my stories seem real. But when I actually write about myself, I get very confused.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

I think it's easier for me to write from experience.

I pecked my stories out two-fingered on the Remington portable typewriter my mother had bought me. I had begged for it when I was ten.

Generally, my writing is influenced by living, by absorbing everything that happens to me and my actions.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I take my inspiration for the song writing from little experiences, not even if I've experienced them myself but say if something has made me sad, I will use that emotion. I just use everyday life and write about it.

As a novelist, where do you go to tap into memories, and impressions, and sensations? It's usually, in my experience, your early life, before you started thinking of yourself as a writer, because somehow those experiences are unadulterated.

People write memoirs because they lack the imagination to make things up.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

I've actually always started with what feels most natural. Which is, the people who surround me in my daily life. So, the first show I ever wrote, which is called 'Surface Transit,' was based in part on people I knew from my family. Co-workers, ex-boyfriends. All of that kind of thing.

All of my books are based in some way on my personal experiences, or the experiences of members of my family, or the stories kids would tell me in school.

I remember that when I got to NYU, everyone was writing scripts. But I was 18 at the time, and when you write a script, so much of it is about what you pull from life, and this sounds sort of cheesy, but I felt like I didn't have enough life experience at that point to write a movie.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

I'm always inspired to write, and it's usually my own life experiences that inspire me.

I began writing fiction when I started running out of material in my own life.

The songs are not necessarily autobiographical. A lot of songs are a combination of influences. It might be some part of my life, or something I've felt, or something somebody's told me. It all comes together.

Naturally, I mine my girlfriends' lives for good anecdotes and stories - so many of their experiences find their way into my books.

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

I always tell people, I never get writer's block because it's coming straight from my brain, like, real-life experiences. I'm like the news. I'm just reporting it for myself.