Author Motivation Quotes

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake.

I don't even know if Stephenie [Meyer] could tell you why she was so fixated on [Twilight] very, very contained story about these very obsessive characters. It's just an anomaly.

Louis Brandeis really inspired me to write this book [Louis D. Brandeis: American Prophet]. It was a crazy deadline. The editor said I'd miss the hundredth anniversary unless I pumped the thing out in six months, because I'd been delaying and dilly dallying for so long. So he both inspired me to get up early and write.

I learned to write by reading the kind of books I wished I'd written.

I don't write because there's an audience. I write because there is literature.

Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.

I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

I don't really think about genre. I like to write books that I'd love to read myself.

You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.

'Fire and Hemlock' is the reason I'm a writer.

I'm my own "ideal reader" in the sense that I write novels that I would want to read.

There are many reasons why novelists write, but they all have one thing in common - a need to create an alternative world.

The first person you should think of pleasing, in writing a book, is yourself. If you can amuse yourself for the length of time it takes to write a book, the publisher and the readers can and will come later.

I try to write the kind of books I like to read.

I did have a child, and I was reading a lot of picture books to her, but at the same time writing a children's book was something that I'd been wanting to do for many years, pretty much since the start of my career.

Writing is like shouting into the world. So when someone shouts back, it's a really big deal. To have people who read hundreds and hundreds of books a year say, 'Hey, we thought this was really great,' that's a huge self-esteem boost.

I like historical fiction. I fell in love with New Orleans the first time I visited it. And I wanted to place a story in New Orleans.

I think that my first book - I was trying to write the kind of book I would have loved as a kid. So it's sort of, like, a book inspired by my childhood reading and the passion that I felt about reading when I was a kid.

Every paper published in a respectable journal should have a preface by the author stating why he is publishing the article, and what value he sees in it. I have no hope that this practice will ever be adopted.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

The book that first made me want to be a writer is Flannery O'Connor's short story collection 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.'

I wouldn't do a project if it weren't a story I wanted to tell. That's rewarding in itself, as a writer, if you're working on a story that you enjoy telling.

What excites me, what attracts me, what gets me up in the morning is telling the next story and getting it out in front of readers and hoping they'll love it too.

Readers are what it's all about, aren't they? If not, why am I writing?