Gene Luen Yang Quotes

You cannot teach creativity - how to become a good writer. But you can help a young writer discover within himself what kind of writer he would like to be.

I guess you could say I've been writing all my life.

Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.

I had no plan to write a western novel, and when I realized it was happening, I was pretty surprised by it. But you have to go with what feels right.

The kind of writing that matters most to me is something you don't learn about. It's constantly coming out of what I don't know rather than what I do know.

When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.

I'm still getting to the good part / the breaking down / learning how to write my story.

For me, you have to not have a formula. You have to not even sit down and say, 'I want to write right now.' It has to just kind of come out. It's not something you can plan.

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.

If your body is excited to do something, that's what you should be doing. Or if it really scares you, you should be doing it.

I don't read books on how to write screenplays just because I'm stubborn. So it's all sort of made up.

I began observing, making paintings of my surroundings, taking a vow of silence, listening, composing music, writing, and making time for formal education. Then I started telling stories.

I'm writing a book and working on my one-woman show, Learning To Be Human.

When I decide to write a story, I don't think too much about what I want it to be, I just let things come naturally and this is how it turns out. It's just how my subconscious works.

Doing interesting things and then writing about them is the best way to become a good writer.

That's the whole point of writing to me - I put my characters under incredible duress, and from that comes their truth. In a way, I'm using them to try to find my own answers in life.

I write songs, and I sing them. I never formulated a plan; I can't tell anyone else how to do this. But it feels right, so I just kind of enjoy it and get on with it.

I do want to work on writing, because writing's a skill. Writing is something that you can train yourself to know better. To know yourself better. And it's intimidating as hell.

I know Charlie Kaufman really well, for instance. Charlie Kaufman starts a story, and he has no freaking idea where he's going. None. Zero. And he doesn't want to know, because there's a little bit of death in that.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

The minute I ever start thinking about what a character would do is the minute I bring my ego into play. It's the minute I'm putting a judgment on something.

I saw I could rhyme words. It came simply to me. But I wrote some pretty horrible songs that I still have on tape.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

When I was younger, I talked to the adults around me that I respected most about how they got where they were, and none of them plotted a course they could have predicted, so it seemed a waste of time to plan too long-term. Since then, I've always gone on my instincts.

I took a couple of creative writing classes with Joyce Carol Oates at Princeton University, and in my senior year there, I took a long fiction workshop with Toni Morrison. I fell in love with it.