Susanna Moore Quotes

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

'The Rose Society' was definitely the hardest book I've ever written, because it's so difficult to stay in that dark space.

What I described in 'Another Life' - about being on the hill and feeling the sort of dissolution that happened - is a frequent experience in a younger writer.

There's some of me in all my characters.

I have a high guilt quotient. A poem can go through as many as 50 or 60 drafts. It can take from a day to two years-or longer.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

I think that when you're writing fiction what you're doing is reflecting life as you see it, and putting down how you think and how other people think, and the sort of confusions that you don't normally like to admit to.

If the novelist shares his or her problems with the characters, he or she is able to study his personal unconscious.

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

I just finished a novel, and I'm back kind of noodling on the screenplays. Screenplays are tough. I am making music, I'm just not sure what kind of music it is or where it's going.

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.

Like most writers, I write about what has happened to me as that involves the minimum amount of research.

I'm so focused on trying to craft the story that I'm in my own little world with it and that process. The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.

Fans always say they laughed and they cried while reading my books. And I tell them that I laughed and cried while writing them.

There are bits of me in all my characters.

There is always going to be a little bit of me in each character.

When I'm sitting writing, I know that something works if I've made myself cry, or laugh, or have a visceral emotion.

When I'm writing a story, which takes me a year or more, I can feel my character living with me - they're responding to whatever funny, familial, or social situation I'm in, and I think about their responses constantly.

I write characters and stories that move me, and I write from the heart.

Every pilot I've ever written, I've fallen deeply and madly in love with. It's the only way I work.

'The Secret Life of Bees' was my first novel, so I had no process. I was flying by the seat of my pants, as they say, trying to understand how I, as a novelist, would work with story.

I've tried to write deep and serious. I spent years working to write a story that would make my writing group cry.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.