Michael Scott Quotes

Sometimes reading other writers helps. You learn some little technique that turns out to be useful, or simply are reinspired by the amazing things others do.

'Blood Meridian' was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer.

Reading yields a wish to write, I think, except if the reading is dull and uninspiring.

Reading usually precedes writing. And the impulse to write is almost always fired by reading. Reading, the love of reading, is what makes you dream of becoming a writer.

I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word. To be a writer - this may seem trite, I realize - you have to actually write.

I love Joan Didion, but I love her writing. I don't think meeting her could solve my problems or make me understand the world better.

I always have a book that I use that somehow inspires my novels.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

A lot of the time writers are just sponges... for what's around them, and so books are helpful for focusing your mind and literally putting it into words.

Other writers definitely influence my writing. What encourages me and inspires me is when I read a good book. It makes me want to be a better writer.

I love it when I start a book that is so good that all I want to do is get back to my own writing, in a competitive way.

I've lost track of the number of people who want to be writers but never actually write anything. Talking about writing, dreaming about writing, can be very fun, but it won't get a book written. You've got to write.

My inspiration for writing is all the wonderful books that I read as a child and that I still read. I think that for those of us who write, when we find a wonderful book written by someone else, we don't really get jealous, we get inspired, and that's kind of the mark of what a good writer is.

I don't know if any single book made me want to write. C.S. Lewis was the first writer to make me aware that somebody was writing the book I was reading - these wonderful parenthetical asides to the reader.

The book that convinced me I wanted to be a writer was 'Crime and Punishment'. I put the thing down after reading it in a fever over two or three days... I said, 'If this is what a book can be, then that is what I want to do.'

I fantasised about becoming an author and wrote my first book at 18 - an introspective novel set in the 1920s.

For me, the optimum circumstances for writing a book are those of stultifying routine.

Cormac McCarthy is my favorite author in the world. I love him so much. There's one book that informs me more than The Road - it's called Suttree. That book is a huge influence on me. I'm not smart enough to emulate him, but he inspires me. He never infiltrates my writing directly. He writes incredibly intelligently about people that are marginalized.

Hands down, the hardest part for me is coming up with an idea. I spend about 14 months writing a book, and that's a lot of hours spent thinking about a single project. I simply have to love the idea. I'll go through dozens of workable ideas until I find the one that lights my fire.

I think that's what turns young men and women into writers - the happiness you discover living in books.

For me, reading books and writing them are tied together. The words of other writers teach me and refresh me and inspire me.

I think what gets you through a small writing project, is just one burst of inspiration. A book, especially a longer book, it's a different kind of force that pushes you through it. It's a vision of the whole thing.

If you want to write, keep cats.

I don't actually talk about my books much, because I find if I talk about them I don't want to write them anymore. I write to find out what happens. You know how you read a book? That's what I'm doing except I'm just doing it a lot slower because it takes a lot longer to do.

It's impossible to read a distinctive stylist like Faulkner, Joyce, Kafka, Mann, Woolf, James - and many more - without wanting to write, however entirely different one's writing will be.