Elizabeth Strout Quotes

I think a lot of the way that I try to write my stories come from watching my mom write plays and trying to do that.

I never thought about what I would write. I just come from such a big family of storytellers.

Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.

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

I've always liked new writing.

Before the day my grandmother shared her treasured letters with me, I honestly wasn't much of a fiction reader, let alone creative writer.

I hope to be with you as a writer for a very long time, and I hope that you will enjoy reading my work, because readers are the highest form of life on this planet.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

My mother is the best storyteller. And her mother was too.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

One thing I always did in my career was writing. I always was writing. I was trying to create things. For myself, for other people.

My aunt got me interested in journalism - she found an old typewriter, had it worked over, put it on the dining room table, gave me a stack of paper and said, 'Play like you're a writer.'

I tell people you should write what you love to read because that's where your passion is.

My father has always been the heart of my Penn Cage novels.

I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday.

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.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

I wrote 'Marvels,' which was about a guy who had two daughters, and I wrote 'Astro City Volume 2 #1,' which was about a guy who had two daughters. In both cases, about a year and a half or two years apart. And then after that, I had two daughters, about a year and a half or two years apart.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

I had always loved to write and my mom was my editor for my school papers.

I spend a lot of time writing. I get inspiration from texts rather than images.

It was Nate Monaster who encouraged me to be a writer.

My inspiration for writing is all the wonderful books that I read as a child and that I still read. I think that for those of us who write, when we find a wonderful book written by someone else, we don't really get jealous, we get inspired, and that's kind of the mark of what a good writer is.

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

When you're starting off as a young writer, you look at all the stuff that's gone before and the stuff that's influenced you, and you reach the ladle of your imagination into this bubbling stew pot of all of this stuff, and you pour it out. And that's where you start from.