Seth Godin Quotes

I'm working with published authors and some very young undergraduates and lots of people in between. They are lovely people, and they can write.

I wrote a novel, so now they can call me a novelist. I tell stories; that's it.

When you write comic books and when you are writing for television, you're not writing the end product, you are writing notes for someone else to make the end product essentially. My scripts are just directions for the artist to draw pages and the pages are what is seen. I kind of feel like it's a safety net, you're able to hide behind the art to a certain extent, and in television you're able to hide behind the actors and the production, but with novels, your words are it

I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.

I think I'm too lazy a writer to do something like historical fiction. You have to do so much research. I just write what I know.

Teaching has ruined more American novelists than drink.

A novelist is on the cusp between someone who knows everything and someone who knows nothing.

I'm not reading currently because I'm getting revisions of a novel. If I read while I'm writing I will unconsciously plagiarize and go to jail.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.

It is the function of the novelist to reveal the hidden life at its source: to tell us more about Queen Victoria than could be known, and thus to produce a character who is not the Queen Victoria of history.

Some writing courses will advise you to write what you know. I've always thought this is very odd advice ... because it means, for example, that I should not be writing about Nicholas Flamel, because I didn't live in France in the 15th Century, I was not an alchemyst, am not immortal (despite the rumours) and do not know magic.

I've been told by people who write historical novels that you just sort of write the emotional truth first, the story at the core, and then you go back and research it at the end.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

You have to write the book that wants to be written.

A commission and an original are two different things, and both have their virtues and vices. A commission is a bit more collaborative, in that you outline the story that you think should be told, and then you write it.

The only way to write a book, I’m fond of telling people, is to actually write a book. That’s how you write a book.

I'm a novelist, period. An American novelist.

Novelists get to direct the perfect films. We get to cast every part. We dress the set exactly as we wish.

I always write a story in one sitting.

A novelist has to know enough about a subject to fool the passenger next to him on an airplane.

One thing I really want to explore is writing.

The best time to tell your story is when you have to tell your story. When it's not really a choice. But then, when you get that first, messy, complicated version down, you have to read it over and be very tough on yourself and ask, 'Well what's the story here?' If you're lucky enough to have someone you trust looking over your shoulder, he or she can help you if [you] lack perspective on your own story.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

I can remember as a college student writing stories and novels, some of which ended up getting published and some that didn't. It was like my head was going to burst - there were so many things I wanted to write all at once. I had so many ideas, jammed up. It was like they just needed permission to come out.