Geraldine Brooks Quotes

I think by definition you need to have lived a little bit to write anything that's humanly true.

I've lived in Kansas for more than thirty years, and for half of those, I was part of a ranching family, so I'm writing about things I know and love.

I started writing poetry when I was six. I had this teacher who didn't believe the poems I'd bring in were mine because they were dark and sad. But I wrote about what I experienced in my childhood.

There's always things that you know about that nobody else, because everybody's life is different. So you write about what you know. That's number one.

Man, that's the only kind of book I like – one that's so real you want to find out everything there is to know about the person who wrote it, like how tall he is and what kind of music he likes and whether or not he really went through all the stuff he was writing about.

I think the only way you can get something out is to invest some real emotion into it, which means you're already writing about what's going to happen to you, whether you know it or not. That's why I'm always surprised when people talk about writer's block. Because to me, it can't be stopped.

I believe that one of the most sound ideas in dramatic writing is that in order to create the universal, you must pay very great attention to the specific. Universality, I think, emerges from truthful identity of what is.

When Toni Morrison said 'write the book you want to read,' she didn't mean everybody.

I'm not proselytizing my method. I don't believe that one writer should tell other writers how to write.

Whatever you have lived, you can write & by hard work & a genuine apprenticeship, you can learn to write well; but what you have not lived you cannot write, you can only pretend to write it.

It is only when you open your veins and bleed onto the page a little that you establish contact with your reader. If you do not believe in the characters or the story you are doing at that moment with all your mind, strength, and will, if you don't feel joy and excitement while writing it, then you're wasting good white paper, even if it sells, because there are other ways in which a writer can bring in the rent money besides writing bad or phony stories.

In the helter-skelter of this book, I didn't develop my views as theory. In fact, I even believe that efforts of that kind are tainted with ponderousness. Nietzsche wrote "with his blood," and criticizing, or, better, experiencing him means pouring out one's lifeblood. It was only with my life that I wrote the Nietzsche book that I had planned.

Whenever I write, I only write about what I know or what I have experienced or feeling.

What everybody is well advised to do is to not write about your own life, this is if you want to write fast. You will be writing about your own life anyway but you won't know it.

I would not know how to advise a man how to write. It is a matter of talent and interest. I believe he must be strongly moved if he is to become a writer.

If only you’d remember before ever you sit down to write that you’ve been a reader long before you were ever a writer. You simply fix that fact in your mind, then sit very still and ask yourself, as a reader, what piece of writing in all the world Buddy Glass would most want to read if he had his heart’s choice. The next step is terrible, but so simple I can hardly believe it as I write it. You just sit down shamelessly and write the thing yourself. I won’t even underline that. It’s too important to be underlined.

All my novels are rooted in their time and in their place. The place of my novels is Israel, almost without exception. Almost without exception, my novels are rooted in Israel because that's the place I know well. And, that's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well. Don't write about that which you don't know.

I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops.

The formula for creative writing in high school or college is write what you know.

What I react against in other people's work, as a filmgoer, is when I see something in a movie that I feel is supposed to make me feel emotional, but I don't believe the filmmaker shares that emotion. They just think the audience will. And I think you can feel that separation. So any time I find myself writing something that I don't really respond to, but I'm telling myself, 'Oh yes, but the audience is going to like this,' then I know I'm on the wrong track and I just throw it out.

can only write about what bites you.

That's my gutsy advice to any young writer: write only about what you know well.

If you want to be an artist, truly try to write what you believe, and if you write when you don't believe then you should try to become an actor.

Write what you know will always be excellent advice for those who ought not to write at all. Write what you think, what you imagine, what you suspect!

Some writing courses will advise you to write what you know. I've always thought this is very odd advice ... because it means, for example, that I should not be writing about Nicholas Flamel, because I didn't live in France in the 15th Century, I was not an alchemyst, am not immortal (despite the rumours) and do not know magic.