Karen Bender Quotes

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I don't know if I want to be a writer.

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

It's with bad sentiments that one makes good novels.

I get intrigued by a first lin and I write to find out why it means something to me. You make discoveries just the way the reader does, so you're simultaneously the writer and the reader.

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'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.

Choosing to write a play is some kind of surrender. I don't make an outline. I sit and work, and suddenly the door opens, and out it comes.

I guess, taking away all the theatrics or the costuming and the outer layers of what I do, I'm a writer... I write.

My dream was, and always had been, to write a book. To be a writer.

A writer writes. If you want to be a writer, write.

I see myself as a story teller.

When I get moved to write a story, I don't question the story. I dive right in, and I try to ignore the voices that are chattering away at me: 'You can't do that', 'You shouldn't do that'. I just sort of leap and take a chance and go for it.

When you are a novelist, you are used to making a narrative do what you want.

I'm a writer and this is what I love to do.

I get ideas for my books from people I know and what happens to them, from places I've been and what happens to me, and from things I read.

If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

For me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I'm still awake. I can continue yesterday's dream today, something you can't normally do in everyday life.

I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

In real life, writers tend to be quite boring, but in our books, we're having exciting adventures all the time.

I'm clearly not a writer, but I'm always a fan of them.

I think the most rewarding part for me is kind of not knowing where the story's going next, and then finding out and being blown away by it.

In Sydney, I gave what was billed as a masterclass to bright students of writing at the University of Sydney. But the term 'masterclass' was possibly over-egging the pudding. All I could do was pass on some lessons from my own life, and the most obvious is that if you want to be a writer, you must first have been a reader.

A writer is what I am.