Jodi Picoult Quotes

Writing is very much an emotional process; it requires you to be very in touch with your feelings. That is the opposite of what you're taught as a medical doctor. We're supposed to be detached and logical. Maybe because I started off as a writer and then became a doctor, I'm able to integrate those two.

I want to go to college. I'm going to take four years off. I don't want to miss that. I want to be a writer. I think that'd be awesome.

Writing is my job. I don't think of it as art.

I always encourage people in the early parts of their career to focus on writing. If you can communicate clearly, if you can articulate a thought, if you can write a great story, then you're going to be successful.

When I was younger, the main struggle was to be a 'good writer.' Now I more or less take my writing abilities for granted, although this doesn't mean I always write well.

Not taking criticism of your writing personally is an enormous step towards surviving the studio system.

Young writers shouldn't be afraid of striving to emulate their favorites. It's a good way to learn, as long as you move on from it and don't publish too many of the results.

I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

You become a good writer just as you become a good joiner: by planing down your sentences.

I used to joke about this but I've recently realized that I really believe it: I spent many years training myself to write very slowly for pretty good money. So the idea of writing really quickly for free offends me.

If you are to become a writer you'll have to stop fooling with words.

Writing ... is a profession that can only be learned by writing.

There's no such thing as a folk writer. There's no such thing as somebody who's never read a book before suddenly sitting down one day and writing one. You have to learn how to captivate a reader. Right? And I don't mean you have to go to school for it. But if you're - if you pay attention, you can learn it by reading books. And so I feel like I learned a lot by reading books.

I look at my first books and am glad they weren't published.... You start writing by imitating your heroes, then you keep the heart of that worship in your work. As time goes by, you get other influences and find your own voice.

It's a really weird feeling when you write something and you really know it and then you watch actors come in and do it.

Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one's first productions.

I'm in good form, taking no interest in things, neglecting clothes, meals, company, and feeling calm and stable as I write.

The only way, I think, to learn to write short stories is to write them, and then try to discover what you have done.

I am trying to keep growing and improving as a writer.

Maybe at 20 you can write well, but I don't think you could do what I do. Some things have to happen to you first.

I didn't write professionally at first. It took me nine years to get anything published. At the beginning I mostly wrote picture books, which were rejected by every children's book publisher in America. The first book of mine to be accepted for publication was ELLA ENCHANTED, and not one but two publishers wanted it. That day, April 17, 1996, was one of the happiest in my life.

Now, writing every day, and being paid for it and encouraged to do it, it was as if, in the midst of the clich?d dark and stormy night, I found the magical inn, its windows golden lit, and Summer was due to start tomorrow. I can only work at one thing well. Deprive me of that, and my "back-up plan," even now, will be the empty, stormy, darkened heath -- where, incidentally, even unpublished, somehow I'll still be writing.

I'd never done anything useful as far as my writing.

It requires more than mere genius to be an author.

The good author is he who contemplates without marked joy or excessive sorrow the adventures of his soul amongst criticisms.