Susan Orlean Quotes

I like to write in all different genres. I just like a new challenge.

Writing is more about imagination than anything else. I fell in love with words. I fell in love with storytelling.

I am a writer, which means I write stories, I write novels, and I would write poetry if I knew how to. I don't want to limit myself.

Literature, of course, is not a contest.

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

I'm always interested in storytelling and whatever form that comes in.

I truly believe that writing is a continuum - so the different genres and forms are simply stops along the same continuum. Different ideas that need to be expressed sometimes require different forms for the ideas to float better. I don't write essays as often as I should.

Those who have been writing literature have not been writing life.

Writing is writing. It is all about telling stories, and I've been doing that for so long, in all realms, that it all feels like the same thing to me anyway.

I never even considered writing a career option. I just liked the play of words. I was certainly interested in story, but the stories I was telling then were in narrative verse and prose poems, short and succinct, except for one novel-length poem written in narrative couplets.

Writing is writing, and stories are stories. Perhaps the only true genres are fiction and non-fiction. And even there, who can be sure?

I'll take a certain concern of my own or a situation and try to frame it around a fictional story, but sometimes just straight-up autobiographical songs work well, and sometimes a story is better. I like stories. I like to hear them. I don't think there are enough of them in songs anymore.

People do write books.

I've always loved writing.

I am a literary animal. For me, everything ends in literature.

I started out as a writer. Poetry and prose and also kind of satirical David Sedaris-esque stuff.

I just feel so lucky to tell stories and make up stories and share them with people.

Basically, I think of fiction and non-fiction as different ways of engaging with the world. You reach a point where you feel you have said all you possibly can, in reportage or a review essay or a reflection on history, which 'From the Ruins of Empire' was.

Basically, I just write whatever story grabs me rather than considering the genre.

Fundamentally, I think of myself as a storyteller, not a writer.

No, the thing is, we all love storytelling, and as a writer you get to tell stories all the time.

Writing is definitely something that interests me a lot.

Writing is writing to me. I'm incapable of saying no to any writing job, so I've done everything - historical fiction, myths, fairy tales, anything that anybody expresses any interest in me writing, I'll write. It's the same reason I used to read as a child: I like going somewhere else and being someone else.

Fiction will always be my greatest love, with poetry close behind.

For me, I used to be shy towards journalism because it wasn't poetry. And then I realized that the events that I covered in essays that became journalism were actually great because they inspired me, and they became my muse.