J. R. Moehringer Quotes

Read everything. Write all the time. And if you can do anything else that gives you equal pleasure and allows you to sleep soundly at night, do that instead. The writing life is an odd one, to say the least.

That process by which you become a writer is a pretty lonely one. We don't have a group apprenticeship like a violinist might training for an orchestra.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.

As a writer, I've always been somebody who's been productive and hustled hard.

Write a lot and don't think about publishing - just the writing.

I love getting up in the morning with nothing else to do except write.

It's hard for me to just practice without writing something.

I don't know where I would place myself in the literary landscape. I really just write the book that I would want to read. And I put on the blinders, and I really - it is, for me, that simple.

The only strategy I know of is to write every day, which I don't always do, because sometimes I just can't, for various reasons that seem out of my control.

'Baker Towers' is the book I've always known I would write, but it wasn't an easy book to do.

I always counsel aspiring novelists that passion is the most important quality for a writer to possess - technique can be taught, but that relentless desire to write has to come from within.

Writing a novel is like making love, but it's also like having a tooth pulled. Pleasure and pain. Sometimes it's like making love while having a tooth pulled.

There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.

The difference between people who believe they have books inside of them and those who actually write books is sheer cussed persistence - the ability to make yourself work at your craft, every day - the belief, even in the face of obstacles, that you've got something worth saying.

I think that with the proliferation of writing programs, people tend to forget that you also have to get used to working alone, and you have to be your own support.

I now have to find a reason to write, every single day.

It was my great problem to solve: how to write a book, you know. And after you write one, you have to write another to prove to yourself you can do it again.

I didn't start really focusing on writing until I was 24.

I think I got serious about writing in the late '90s. The first stuff I wrote was terrible and got rejected, but I started getting more encouraging rejection letters.

Every day I write. I am not waiting for a great idea from heaven.

What I'm trying to say is that a lot that lies behind being able to live the writing life is psychological and wrapped up in ideas of self-definition.

I'd love to maybe try writing. I don't know if I'd publish anything, but as a hobby, it's really nice. I bought a typewriter, and I really like to write on the typewriter sometimes. It's a fun little hobby.

I just have to proceed as usual. No matter what happens, nothing helps with the writing of the next book.

I've always kind of wrote when I wanted to. Once I get the idea in my head and get it outlined out, I usually just sit and write until it's done.