Kevin Henkes Quotes

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

Something about your life always makes its way into your stories. That's just the nature of the beast.

I do understand my limitations as a fiction writer, which is why my novels are always going to be close to home.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

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

Of course, all writers draw upon their personal experiences in describing day-to-day life and human relationships, but I tend to keep my own experiences largely separate from my stories.

I know it may sound silly, but I think my short stories have a life and identity of their own. They crop up in all sorts of places.

I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

Every book is its own experience, the writing of it.

I think I've written 40 books, and none of them have been heavy on action. I'm an introspective person.

Each book is a separate entity for me. When I'm writing it, I enter its world and inhabit its vocabulary. I forget, as it were, that I ever wrote anything else.

I've always kind of ripped from real life to some degree or at least how I'm feeling in the moment. In fact, maybe that's really it. In anything I've ever written, all the characters sound like me, which I don't think is a bad thing.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

I try to have a mood or a rhythm for a chapter.

It isn't as if a writer merely records life as it unfurls. Reality does not automatically transcribe as literature; real people are not shapely, compelling characters to be harvested. Charming facts and sharp observations rarely slide seamlessly into whatever narrative is at hand.

I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.

The thing I love about being a novelist is that with each project, you invent a new world. You approach it with a different set of aesthetic and structural ideas, and you grapple with a different series of problems in figuring out how to tell the story. And yet there are certain concerns that stay constant.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

The novelist in me is probably hiding behind all the stories I write, looking for ways to connect them and continue the conversation with readers. Maybe I'm writing one long narrative, and each book, however different from the last, is just a chapter.

I always find stuff in my characters to relate to.

Every character a writer creates has some of themselves in it somewhere.

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.