Judith Viorst Quotes

I sometimes don't try to invent something. I wait for some kind of a direction - and it happens. I get an angle, for instance, and it just appears, and I say, 'Oh my God - that's it!'

As I'm writing, certain things become clear to me and certain things begin to feel right and make sense. The pieces start to fall into place.

My insights come in periods of working. There are wonderful moments of surprise, but I'm superstitious enough not to want to talk about them.

You see something, then it clicks with something else, and it will make a story. But you never know when it's going to happen.

Inspiration is some mysterious blessing which happens when the wheels are turning smoothly.

Every now and then, I strike something that just goes click, you know, in my head. As Gertrude Stein used to say, it rings the bell, and I feel, this is great.

I don't know how to explain it, but when you're working on something constantly, and you're digging in deep, things kind of fall in, and you grab them, and you're like, 'That one!' and 'That thing!' and it starts to build something right.

The most joyful part of writing, for me, is when I am 90% there, and suddenly the story clicks into place, and things finally start to make sense.

A hunch is creativity trying to tell you something.

I think it was the fact that I liked it so much that made the writing just come out of me automatically.

I have trusted to my intuition to find the subjects, and I have written intuitively. I have an idea when I start, I have a shape; but I will fully understand what I have written only after some years.

It's just as well that I write in the same facile way wherever I am - no blocks or anguish, no contemplation, no elaborate revision, no need for love-tokens or nice views.

When the ideas are coming, I don't stop until the ideas stop because that train doesn't come along all the time.

Inspiration may be a form of super-consciousness, or perhaps of subconsciousness I wouldn't know. But I am sure it is the antithesis of self-consciousness.

In the quiet moments, the discoveries are made.

You never know when your ideas are going to come back to you.

I've had to really teach myself that when you're not feeling it, you shouldn't write anything down because you're going to end up coming back and re-writing it later. Whereas, if you write when you're feeling something, when you're really in the streak, then that's when you're going to get your best stuff.

I do not 'get' ideas; ideas get me.

Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.

I think people who create and write, it actually does flow-just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It's simple.

Every time I write something down I check it to see if it has that telltale glow, the glow that tells me there's something there. If it glows, it stays. Everything is either on or off.

You can find inspiration when you're not even looking for it.

I put myself in a spiritual and physical place where I've learned from experience the synapses are likely to fire and the juices are likely to flow, and simply begin to write.

It's not that I sit down and write great stuff without thinking, not at all. Most of it is terrible. But the stuff that feels fun and fresh to me tends to happen fairly unthinkingly.

Sometimes ideas are coming so fast that I have to stop doing one song to get another. But I don't forget the first one. If it works, it will always be there. It's like the truth: it will find you and lift you up. And if it ain't right, it will dissolve like sand on the beach.