Cheryl Strayed Quotes

If you write with passion in your own style, you will make a place for yourself

Talking like touching. Writing like punching somebody.

If you really want a prize, or if you really want applause, you should try to write as many books as humanly possible.

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

Set your fantasies in the here and now and then, if challenged, claim to be writing Magical Realism.

I think precision in writing goes hand in hand with not trying to say everything. You try and say two-thirds, so the reader will involve himself or herself.

The style developed over decades, really, but I started out writing pretty traditional stories, then became impatient. It was a writer named Russell Edson who showed me that one could write in any way at all.

We cannot write well or truly but what we write with gusto.

I tend to write a lot, which I think is the secret to being prolific.

That's how it always is with me: the thing that sets me down to start writing is usually not what I end up doing. Because, as much as I love genre, and I try to deliver the goods, I go off from it. I go do my own thing.

In America, where writers are preoccupied with the craft of writing, I always try to introduce this concept of the badly written good story. Turning the hierarchy around and putting passion on top and not craft, because when you just focus on craft, you can write something that is very sterile.

I write just because the fire of my emotion is burning. Had I not, I would not have been able to find peace.

The best style of writing, as well as the most forcible, is the plainest.

Write plays that matter. Raise the stakes. Shout, yell, holler, but make yourself heard. It's time for playwrights to reclaim the theatre. We do that by speaking from the heart about the things that matter most to us. If a play isn't worth dying for, maybe it isn't worth writing.

In general, I'm careful when I'm dealing with subjects of deep cultural importance and write with abandon when I'm dealing with issues of personal dysfunction.

Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.

I always hope to come up with a style of writing that's appropriate to the material and I felt like this was. And then there's plenty of - I don't know if it's the right word but - lampooning, but it's always at my expense.

I don't look at scripts. I just write them.

Don't try to outguess what's going on in publishing, and write what you want to write.

I'm not interested in writing for adults. I like them as people! I don't like the way they publish books in that world. Nothing ever gets a chance.

I have always felt that if I am very personal and connected with what I myself am living, my writing will transcend ecclesial boundaries.

One of the things about writing a novel is you can do it any way you want. It's your voice that's important and I see absolutely no reason why a screenplay can't be the same. It makes it a hell of a lot easier when you're the writer and the director.

When I get about five readers I can rub together in one genre, I leave that genre and go somewhere else. And this is due to a vow that I made myself when I started writing - that if I had any success at all, I would not be bound to one form of writing. That I would write what moves me. The only way I can see me surviving and doing more than one book is to present the readers with a Dan Simmons novel, with whatever tropes and protocols from whatever genre I want to borrow them. If that builds a Dan Simmons readership, well then, okay. Otherwise, forget about it. I'd rather drive a truck.

It doesn't matter to me whether I write in a man's voice or a woman's, or first or third person for that matter. Those choices come down to the story and I just go with it.

No one can write a best seller by trying to. He must write with complete sincerity; the clichés that make you laugh, the hackneyed characters, the well-worn situations, the commonplace story that excites your derision, seem neither hackneyed, well worn nor commonplace to him. ... The conclusion is obvious: you cannot write anything that will convince unless you are yourself convinced. The best seller sells because he writes with his heart's blood.