Barry Lopez Quotes

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

Until a book starts forming in your head, you always wonder, 'Am I going to be able to do this again?'

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

There's a mystery to writing, and you don't really know where most of it comes from.

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

It takes a lot of adrenaline and fear to make me actually write.

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

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

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.

You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.

The writing part of my life never changes, because that's just when the inspiration comes.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

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.

There's actually nothing interesting about me except what I write.

Writing is nothing more than a guided dream.

Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'