R. L. Stine Quotes

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

I can't tell you any more than any other writer can tell you why they write, and I don't know what my influences are.

I really write for people.

The only other thing which I think is important is: Don't write a book or start a book with the expectation of communicating a message in a very important way.

The only real advice you can give anyone is to keep writing.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

I write what's given me to write.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

I think I'm writing for an intelligent stranger - you know, in my mind I can't remember who coined that phrase first. I don't want to write anything that makes me cringe, first of all. I cringe a lot - mostly when I hear popular music.

It's such a gift when you know who you're writing for and you know that that actor is capable of so much that you can relax a bit.

What excites me, what attracts me, what gets me up in the morning is telling the next story and getting it out in front of readers and hoping they'll love it too.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

When I sit down to write a book, I don't ask myself, "How many am I going to sell?"

There are books that a writer undertakes because she wants to go on a journey, and there are journeys a writer undertakes because she wants to write a book.

In the mental disturbance and effort of writing, what sustains you is the certainty that on every page there is something left unsaid.

The book [ One Thousand Gifts] took just over a year to write, on the fringe hours, early and late, around home educating 6 kids and farming and blogging. And I wonder if the greatest challenges was to keep pressing into it when I had never been here before. I felt like Abraham - being called to something that he didn't know how to get to.

I didn't write because I had anything to say, but in order to find out what there was to say.

First, I do not sit down at my desk to put into verse something that is already clear in my mind. If it were clear in my mind, I should have no incentive or need to write about it. We do not write in order to be understood; we write in order to understand.

Technique in the minds of many is something rigid, something like a formula that you impose on the material; but in the best stories it is something organic, something that grows out of the material, and this being the case, it is different for every story of any account that has ever been written.

I often envy a filmmaker or a playwright or an author where people are like, "Yeah, I sat down every night and read your book and it was beautiful." Or, "Yeah, I went to the movies and all I did was watch the movie because that's all you could do at the movies." Where with music, it's like, "Ugh, I love your music. I listen to it while I'm jogging thinking about how I hate my body." But it is also the privilege of being a musician is you can have your music in this documented form and play it live and that's, I think, what draws me to it the most.

Without writers fooling themselves about what their books might accomplish there would be no books at all.

Y'see, I get so bored so easily. I like to start with a clean slate each time. Sure, I'll have characters drop in and out of books but the main cast of characters always changes. Maybe I'm wrong but I think if had the same joe detective guy or gal, I wouldn't write them as well; I wouldn't do as good a job.

There's a lot of sub-conscious stuff you may write but you don't then suddenly sit down and take out your analytical books and say: I'm determined to find out where this came from. You'd probably be wrong anyway.

I have a huge music library and deliberately choose the piece of music to match the piece I'm writing. So, every book I write has its own "soundtrack."

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.