David Sedaris Quotes

Mostly, I would like people to ask other writers about the craft of their writing so we could learn from one another. We ask movie directors why they chose to use certain lights and angles and speeds of film, but most of the time, we ignore the craft of a writer.

Writers cannot simply have a go, imagining it's easier to produce a story than a novel because fewer words are required. Have a go by all means; be intrepid, but be equipped.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

I have also led you astray by talking of technique as if it were something that could be separated from the rest of the story. Technique can't operate at all, of course, except on believable material.

I remember that the day I finished 'The Angels,' part three of 'The Book of Laughter and Forgetting', I was terribly proud of myself. I was sure that I had discovered the key to a new way of putting together a narrative.

I started writing by doing small related things but not the thing itself, circling it and getting closer. I had no idea how to write fiction. So I did journalism because there were rules I could learn. You can teach someone to write a news story. They might not write a great one, but you can teach that pretty easily.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

I wrote two plotted books, got some of the fundamentals of storytelling down, then... it's sort of like taking the training wheels off, trying to write a book that's fun in the same way without relying on quite such mechanical or external beats.

I learned to write fiction the way I learned to read fiction - by skipping the parts that bored me.

I like going back and writing fiction.

What that book does for me is give me the tools in the same way that I had the tools when I learned the regular scales or the alphabet. If you give me the tools, the syntax, and the grammar, it still doesn't tell me how to write Ulysses.

I do think that short story writing is often a matter of luck.

I don't read much nonfiction because the nonfiction I do read always seems to be so badly written. What I enjoy about fiction - the great gift of fiction - is that it gives language an opportunity to happen.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

I want to be a better writer. I want to learn and grow, to know how to tell stories in a different and more challenging way. I've learned it doesn't get easier each time. It actually gets harder.

I was writing fantasy as soon as I could hold a pen.

I have always been immersed in a world filled with words, earlier as a reader and now, finally, as both a reader and a writer.

What you're normally doing as a writer is trying to find the narrative.

I've never invested myself properly in trying to write stories. When I write lyrics, mostly I write each sentence separately on an index card and then I lay them out and I just mix them up.

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.

Also, they don't understand - writing is language. The use of language. The language to create image, the language to create drama. It requires a skill of learning how to use language.

I would recommend the short story form, which is a lot harder to write since you have to be so careful with words, until there is plenty of time to doodle through a novel.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.