Markus Zusak Quotes

The stitch of a book is its words.

When you use words, you're able to keep your mind alive. Writing is my way of reaffirming my own existence.

I was always writing. I've always been attracted to words and stories, communication.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

We are already so many things by the time we reach the middle of life that it is possible to see that really anything can happen, and that, by extension, anything is doable. I decided I'd write 'The Calling' as someone else. Another writer entirely, a fictional one who would be played by me.

A dinosaur out of context is like a character without a story. Worse than that, the character suffers from amnesia.

To reject the word is to reject the human search.

Any story that I can consider worth telling is one that you could tell in words.

And eventually as I kept writing it, something emerged that was not quite me but a version of me.

Character and story are suggested by the voice in the words themselves.

In the midst of observing the world and coming to consciousness, I was becoming a writer, and what I wanted to put on the page were the stories of people who looked like me.

You still had to find the music inside your language. You know, it was - that's a big part of what sort of moved me to begin writing the book. I wrote a little essay and I felt, yeah, this is a good voice. This is a good feeling. It feels like me.

I did not always know I would be a writer. Until I had a room of my own, I did not write much at all - no more than any other child who read a lot of books. I began to write fiction and poetry when I first had a room that was truly my own with a door that shut and some measure, however fragile, of privacy.

I wrote a book called ‘Dancing The Dream’. It was more autobiographical than Moonwalk, which I did with Mrs. Onassis. It wasn’t full of gossip and scandal and all that trash that people write, so I don’t think people paid much attention to it, but it came from my heart. It was essays, thoughts and things that I’ve thought about while on tour

I think you could say every pastor is writing this book [ Max on Life]; for many it just never gets published.

I love writing. I've always written journals. I loved writing the book on living alone.

In one deep sense, novels are concealed autobiography. I don't mean that you are telling facts about yourself, but you are trying to find out what you really think or who you are.

Writing is not an end in itself but life transmuted into radiance.

I think that most writers who are trying to write important and difficult books are in many ways putting their own humanity into question. Sometimes the journey is finding out where you stand in relationship to your own humanity and to the humanity of others.

Writing mirrors the interior self. You know, any book is like the perfect blueprint of the psyche of the author.

I have been a writer since 1949. I am self-taught. I have no theories about writing that might help others. When I write, I simply become what I seemingly must become. I am six feet two and weigh nearly two hundred pounds and am badly coordinated, except when I swim. All that borrowed meat does the writing. In the water I am beautiful.

All names mean something.

I use my fiction to explore my own unconscious issues. I usually don't even know what's going on with me until I'm writing.

I never thought I could write this much and now that it's coming to an end, I feel sad that I have to stop, sort of the way you feel at the end of a really good book and you know you're going to miss the main character. But in this case, the main character is me! Myself. Joe (formerly JoDan) Bunch. —Joe Bunch

Words mean more than we mean to express when we use them: so a whole book ought to mean a great deal more than the writer meant.