Sue Monk Kidd Quotes

I spend a lot of time in a sort of free state when I'm writing in the beginning and sketching.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

Stories surge up out of nowhere, and if they feel compelling, you follow them. You let them unfold inside you and see where they are going to lead.

For someone who writes fiction, in order to activate the imagination and the unconscious, it's essential to be free.

I get to use fiction as a way to work out my thinking and to delight readers in the process. I can't think of any deal that's better for me, and I'm always so grateful that readers have indulged me as I argue with myself in my stories.

Being a writer is great because you get to come up with stuff.

I'm always thinking about stories and ideas, and I have a few I'd like to actively pursue, but as much as I love them, I love the process of creation, and I want to go on and create things for myself, and create new things.

Writing is an incessant process of discovery.

Writing is an exploration. You start from nothing and learn as you go.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

When I start to write, words have become physical presence. It was to see if I could bring that private world to life that found its first expression through reading. I really dislike the romantic notion of the artist.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

In fiction, you have a rough idea what's coming up next - sometimes you even make a little outline - but in fact you don't know. Each day is a whole new - and for me, a very invigorating - experience.

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

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

I get to do what I love every day. I get to crawl into someone else's head and I love that.

I try to begin writing as close to a dreamlike state as I can get.

I pick up my pen. It flows. A building appears. There it is. There is nothing more to say.

Early on my career, I figured out that I just have to write the book I have to write at that moment. Whatever else is going on in the culture is just not that important. If you could get the culture to write your book, that would be great. But the culture can't write your book.

I feel like you just need to keep writing until the writing itself just begins to take shape.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.