Captivating Writing Quotes

When you're a writer, you talk about things that move you, that you feel really deep inside you that's something that moves you, and you hope it'll move people, too.

I like literature that you respond to in some way. You laugh, you cry, you turn the light on - that's great, it's eliciting a response by proxy.

Hemingway was really early. I probably started reading him when I was just eleven or twelve. There was just something magnetic to me in the arrangement of those sentences. Because they were so simple - or rather they appeared to be so simple, but they weren't.

Joyce's writing in Dubliners contains some of the most unshowily beautiful sentences in the English language. I learned from him that if you write a good, clean line of English, you can get under a reader's skin. The reader won't even know why, but there you are. Didion, Berger, the many others I mentioned above, and many, many poets I haven't mentioned. Writers of this calibre are the moving targets the rest of us are always chasing.

Michael Koryta is that rare author who is at once a compelling story teller and a fantastic writer. From the first sentence of THOSE WHO WISH ME DEAD, you'll be under his spell. His characters are living, breathing people you'll care about; his setting is a place you'll visit and stay-long after you've decided to leave because you're scared. You can't leave; you're trapped. There are too many nerve-jangling, beautifully written, razor sharp moments and you won't want to miss a single one. This is an absolute sizzler.

'Mystic River' just smelled interesting to me. So I read it and liked it right away. Even the dialogue in it was great.

The truth is, you have about three paragraphs in a short story, three pages in a novel, to capture that editor's attention enough for her to finish your story.

I've always been into 'fast-paced, don't bore 'em, keep it moving along, stick with the story.' You know: tell a story the way I want to hear a story. I find it more rewarding to write for kids, but I also find it a little easier, because you can just let loose a little bit more in terms of fantasy and stuff.

When I started to be a writer, I was not going to run the risk of boring you.

Writing in a nuanced way, getting at all the details in a way that remains interesting for the reader, is very difficult.

The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.

I try to write in a way that makes people feel things.

Mass market paperback thrillers are a dime a dozen. The trick is to find something that actually sticks to the ribs.

I work on the assumption, or let it be the fear, that the reader will stop reading if I stop being interesting.

A fantastic, gleeful, chrome-plated-slick debut of a novel. In Jonathan Chase, Markham has created the perfect cliche-shattering super spy while honoring the progenitors. Dangerously sharp, and genuinely fun-and very, very, very smart. I want more books like this. I want more books from the mind of Mr. Markham!

One reads many scripts, and some of them are good and some of them are not, but every now and then, one really grabs you. You simply can't put it down.

Levi is one of the best authors I've ever read. It's hard not to have an immediate personal response to his work. He has such a quiet tone.

The best book, like the best speech, will do it all - make us laugh, think, cry and cheer - preferably in that order.

Everything I write about either I have gone through or I know somebody has gone through, so it's very close to me, but sometimes it's about taking those feelings and exaggerating on them a little bit: being a bit more dramatic but still keeping them relatable.

I realized how wonderful YA is and how I really wanted to write something that created that level of intrigue.

The first thing that attracts me to any script is the writing. If I find myself becoming lost in a good yarn, then I feel certain that others will, too.

You must write for children in the same way as you do for adults, only better.

I am influenced by books which don't have their eye on the endgame, but which try to be entertaining on each and every page.

Anyone who picks up a Compton-Burnett finds it very hard not to put it down.

I want to write so well that a person is 30 or 40 pages in a book of mine... before she realizes she's reading.