Kathryn Stockett Quotes

I know it's working when I'm writing a book if I'm laughing or crying.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

Listen, I wrote 10 unsuccessful books before I broke through, so I'm looking all the time to keep my books fascinating. I want to write what people want to read, not push any message.

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

When I started writing fiction, I knew how good it was immediately.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

You write, hoping to write a good book; that's it.

Writing a book is very personal. It's a very personal relationship. A book will start with something as simple as two men talking about work. That gets the fire going. Sustaining that fire is the hard work. It takes attention and empathy to hone the characters.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

My shorthand answer is that I try to write the kind of book that I would like to read. If I can make it clear and interesting and compelling to me, then I hope maybe it will be for the reader.

We all want to write the kind of book that we want to read. If you put in the things that you are thinking about and create characters who feel like they could live - at least for me, that's the way I want to write.

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

What I found so captivating about the idea of being a writer was having the ability to write down all these things I made up in my head so other people could see them.

The only advice I can give to aspiring writers is to write the book that you would want to read, and hope other people agree.

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

I began to ask two questions while I was reading a book that excited me: not only what was going to happen next, but how is this done? How is it that these words on the page make me feel the way I'm feeling? This is the line of inquiry that I think happens in a child's mind, without him even knowing he has aspirations as a writer.

I've always wanted to be a writer. Ever since I learned to read, I've wanted to share stories with others the way my favorite writers shared their stories with me.