Sarah Orne Jewett Quotes

The thing that teases the mind over and over for years, and at last gets itself put down rightly on paper whether little or great, it belongs to Literature.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

Writing novels preserves you in a state of innocence - a lot passes you by - simply because your attention is otherwise diverted.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

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

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I like the idea of being a working writer, not of saying that it's going to take me 30 years to write my magnum opus.

Writing is the beast unto itself.

I thought I could write. So it was my intention to start off as a writer. But I wasn't really great at delivering the word at the end of the day.

Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.

I think writing is such a great talent, and if I was better, I would love to be a writer.

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

When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go AWOL, and then I've nothing to write.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

Literature boils with the madcap careers of writers brought to the edge by the demands of living on their nerves, wringing out their memories and their nightmares to extract meaning, truth, beauty.

It's that drama that drives authors, you know.

I write what's given me to write.