Laurie Halse Anderson Quotes

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

I can only write a book like 'The Tin Drum' or 'From the Diary of a Snail' at a special period of my life. The books came about because of how I felt and thought at the time.

As a writer, I wouldn't know how to not take things out of my life.

I was swimming in my swimming pool when 'The Secret Lovers' popped entire into my head. I got out, dried off, went upstairs, and finished the book in about 50 days.

I just sort of write the book I feel like writing given the emotional place I am in my life at the time.

My most successful books, the ones that I feel the strongest about, are the ones that started with a premise that for me was deeply emotional.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

Writing songs has always been hard and easy. It's not always easy when you want it to be, and then sometimes it's just like turning on the faucet. That's just the nature of it.

I have these huge black foam boards on the wall, and tacked to them, I have these white punch cards with my story ideas, scenes and notes.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

Stories come to me and I don't know where they come from, but afterwards I can look back and say, 'Oh yes, that's got a little bit of me, or a little bit of my own son in it'. That's where ideas come from.

The thing is I write to music, so every script I have has its own playlist. Music just opens me up to the emotions that I'm writing. It's just a pretty cool thing.

I tend to write it and then let go emotionally.

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.

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.

I never think of an entire book at once. I always just start with a very small idea. In 'Holes,' I just began with the setting; a juvenile correctional facility located in the Texas desert. Then I slowly make up the story, and rewrite it several times, and each time I rewrite it, I get new ideas, and change the old ideas around.

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.

It's called Sisters of the Winter Madrigal. It was interesting for me to see it done after so many years; because I wrote it and I didn't realize what a rage I was in.

Even the crudest, most derivative novel is an expression of the author's hopes and fears and ideas about good and evil.

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

I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.

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.'