Anna Quindlen Quotes

Don't be pretentious is my first advice to young writers. This is the big problem - just because you're getting an MFA doesn't mean you have to write for the Academy. Be true to your personality. Don't temper your personality down with words. Don't build defensive fortresses around yourself with words - words are your friends.

I always wrote about things that were important to me. I think our past success showed that it was also important for a lot of others.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

I enjoy, in the summer, getting back to writing in my own voice.

That's the secret to anything we write. You have to bring your experience to it. Otherwise, how do you expect anyone else to connect to it?

I've always said my audience is just me. It's somebody out there who's exactly like me and just isn't writing Daring Fireball.

When you write from your gut and let the stuff stay flawed and don't let anybody tell you to make it better, it can end up looking like nothing else.

My goal beyond being an actor, is just being an open channel.

A man who writes well writes not as others write, but as he himself writes; it is often in speaking badly that he speaks well.

I've always been the audience that I wanted to reach, so I write for myself.

Somebody out there was trying to use my language and trying to speak for me. Rather than have that happen, I thought I'd do it myself. It's a fun thing. It's a way for fans to connect.

If you write well, you don't have to dress funny.

Writing is one of the most assertive things a person can do.

Don't try to figure out what other people want to hear from you; figure out what you have to say.

Write what you would love to read. Finish what you begin to write. Your voice is uniquely yours and we are all waiting to hear it.

The key thing is, don't worry about if anyone is reading you or not. Figure out your voice and figure out what you want to write about, what you're good at, what you like doing.

It's not knowing how to write that makes you interesting, it's what you write.

Good writing is often about letting go of fear and affectation. Affectation itself, beginning with the need to define some sorts of writing as 'good' and other sorts as 'bad' is fearful behavior.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy communicating and connecting.

Learning to sing one's own songs, to trust the particular cadences of own's voices, is also the goal of any writer.

Keep me up till five because all your stars are out, and for no other reason…Oh dare to do it Buddy! Trust your heart. You’re a deserving craftsman. It would never betray you. Good night. I’m feeling very much over-excited now, and a little dramatic, but I think I’d give almost anything on earth to see you writing a something, an anything, a poem, a tree, that was really and truly after your own heart.

What my character is or how many jails I have lounged in, or wards or walls or wassails, how many lonely-heart poetry readings I have dodged, is beside the point. A man's soul or lack of it will be evident with what he can carve upon a white sheet of paper.

I write to be read. I'm quite direct about that. I'm not writing to thrill colleagues or to impress the professors at the University of Iowa; that's not my goal.

I'm attracted to music made by people who let themselves be emotional. They really care about what they do, and we believe in what they say.

The artists that I relate to and love the most are the ones where I can listen to the record, and I can know them better, and for me, that's writing it.