John Steinbeck Quotes

I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you're going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by.

I was always concerned with writing to my age at a particular moment. That was the way I would keep faith with the audience that supported me as I went along.

Somewhere in this process, I begin reading and showing my book to my audience. When I say my audience, I mean a single imaginary child who is a blend of myself as a young person, the students in my wife's classroom of first- through third-graders, and the students from two classrooms I visit regularly in the Bronx, New York.

I guess I'm trying to write stuff that I, as a viewer, would connect to.

Whenever I write a part, I think there's this person somewhere in the world that this part is specifically for, and all I have to do is go searching to find that particular individual.

The secret of successful writing lies in striking the right keys on the typewriter.

There's an old adage in writing: 'Don't tell, but show.' Writing is not psychology. We do not talk 'about' feelings. Instead the writer feels and through her words awakens those feelings in the reader. The writer takes the reader's hand and guides him through the valley of sorrow and joy without ever having to mention those words.

We waste a lot of time and a lot of talent trying to write for the common reader, whom we will never meet. Instead we should be writing for our ideal reader.

When you play a smaller, more intimate venue, you can have real conversations with your audience, take risks, and stay current. You can also change the set list, on how the day feels or how the audience reacts. When you do arena shows, every arena looks and feels the same. You can't see who is in the room.

Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.

A writer either speaks to adults and bores kids, or speaks to kids and upsets adults.

I'll give you the sole secret of short-story writing, and here it is: Rule 1. Write stories that please yourself. There is no rule 2. The technical points you can get from Bliss Perry. If you can't write a story that pleases yourself, you will never please the public. But in writing the story forget the public.

If you write for the critics, only the critics will read you.

You want the greatest trick for writing a novel? Here it is: imagine urgently whispering your story into one person's ear - and only one. This one visualization will clarify every word choice you make.

I've never written for anybody else. For me, it was a challenge. I write for me. I don't write for anybody else. And what was good about it was that I was writing for somebody I knew. I knew what my mother thinks and how she feels. So it was finding that creative spirit to write about my mother.

In the big picture I write for an audience of people I've never met. By the final draft I'm looking for anything in the prose that's prospectively boring to strangers.

I think of myself as writing for one person, that one perfect reader who understands and loves.

In a sense, the story, or poem or verse or whatever it is you're writing, you can kind of think of it as a kind of projectile. Imagine it is a kind of projectile which has been specially shaped to be aerodynamic, and that your target is the soft grey putty of the reader's brain.

... to write well it is entirely necessary to read widely and deeply. Good poems are the best teachers.

Usually when I'm writing, I kind of know what it is before I start writing and I write stream of consciousness style.

The art of writing is the art of applying the seat of the pants to the seat of the chair.

I think that as you learn more about writing you learn to be direct.

I want my stories to move people ... to feel some kind of reward from the writing.

Study your reader first - your product second. If you understand his reactions, and present those phases of your product that relate to his needs, then you cannot help but write a good letter.

I didn't study writing in school, I studied biology as an undergraduate and graduate student. So I think that I write fiction in the scientific way. I love invention, obviously; I love creation of character. But I do feel very rooted in the real world, even in the way that I create characters.