Anna Quindlen Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• I read and walked for miles at night along the beach, writing bad blank verse and searching endlessly for someone wonderful who would step out of the darkness and change my life. It never crossed my mind that that person could be me.

  Anna Quindlen

  Life, Beach, Ocean

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Living Out Loud”, p.11, Ballantine Books

• Every story has already been told. Once you've read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.

  Anna Quindlen

  Inspirational Life, Writing, Wrinkles

  Anna Quindlen (2009). “Being Perfect”, p.36, Random House

• Not writing at all leads to nothing.

  Anna Quindlen

  Writing

• The beginning and the end are never really the journey of discovery for me. It is the middle that remains a puzzle until well into the writing. That's how life is most of the time, isn't it? You know where you are and where you hope to wind up. It's the getting there that's challenging.

  Anna Quindlen

  Writing, Journey, Discovery

• We are writers. We danced with words, as children, in what became familiar patterns. The words became our friends and our companions, and without even saying it aloud, a thought danced with them: I can do this. This is who I am.

  Anna Quindlen

  Children, Writing, Who I Am

• People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.

  Anna Quindlen

  Block, Writing, People

  Essay, www.amazon.com.

• Downtime is where we become ourselves, looking into the middle distance, kicking at the curb, lying on the grass or sitting on the stoop and staring at the tedious blue of the summer sky. I don't believe you can write poetry, or compose music, or become an actor without downtime, and plenty of it, a hiatus that passes for boredom but is really the quiet moving of the wheels inside that fuel creativity.

  Anna Quindlen

  Summer, Distance, Lying

  Anna Quindlen (2004). “Loud and Clear”, p.25, Random House

• I don't have to listen to the Gospel on Sunday to know the stories of the New Testament. They inform so much of what I write that they're practically like a news scrim that goes through my brain 24/7.

  Anna Quindlen

  Writing, Sunday, Brain

  "Anna Quindlen: Over 50, And Having 'Plenty Of Cake'". "Fresh Air" with Terry Gross, kcur.org. April 24, 2012.

• Jane Austen may not be the best writer, but she certainly writes about the best people. And by that I mean people just like me.

  Anna Quindlen

  Writing, Mean, People

• I can't begin to predict how news will be delivered to readers in, say, 100 years. But I do know one thing that hasn't changed: Whatever the delivery system, whether it's a magazine, book or blog, people like vivid writing, strong stories and credible people. So while the venue is changing rapidly, human nature isn't, which I find soothing.

  Anna Quindlen

  Strong, Book, Writing

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

• Well, I'd like to think I am, and I'd also like to think that we're all having a lot more fun getting older than we pretend. It was interesting to me when I first started working on this book that I'd mentioned that I was writing a memoir about aging and everybody would moan and groan and carry on.

  Anna Quindlen

  Fun, Book, Writing

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I think books in which people are really happy and things are going well are probably the most challenging novels there are to write, and there are very few of them.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Writing, Thinking

• I will never understand people who think that the way to show their righteous opposition to sexual freedom is to write letters full of filthy words.

  Anna Quindlen

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Anna Quindlen (2010). “Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private”, p.4, Ballantine Books

• Writing seems to be the only profession people imagine you can do by thinking about doing it.

  Anna Quindlen

  Writing, Thinking, People

  Source: www.writersdigest.com

• I'm writing this memoir from the perspective of somebody who's prosperous and has means. Having said that, one of the things that I think I discovered about those additional years is that I don't think they really are added to the end of life.

  Anna Quindlen

  Writing, Mean, Thinking

  Source: www.pbs.org

• Novels are usually built on conflict, sometimes very, very difficult conflict. It's why men write war novels - because there you go, there's the conflict writ large.

  Anna Quindlen

  War, Writing, Men

• Uncontrollable consumerism has become a watchword of our culture despite regular and compelling calls for its end. The United States has more malls than high schools; Americans spend more time shopping than reading. ... Some of the most insightful writing about the American character over the nation's history has been about neither freedom nor democracy but about the crazed impulse to acquire things.

  Anna Quindlen

  Reading, Writing, School

  Anna Quindlen (2004). “Loud and Clear”, p.184, Random House

• Writing for UrbanMoms has awarded me a multitude of amazing opportunities. I have traveled to new places; alone and with my family. I have discovered new products, new books, new trends and new restaurants, and been able to share them with my readers. I've met other wonderful writers and many incredible celebrities.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Writing, Opportunity

  Source: urbanmoms.ca

• At the same time that you've got to open yourself up to the fact that experience is going to teach you year after year, decade after decade. I remember I very badly wanted to write a newspaper column when I was only 21 years old, and I went to my editor and told him that, and he said, "You're a really good writer, but you haven't lived long enough to be qualified to live out loud."

  Anna Quindlen

  Writing, Years, Editors

  Source: www.pbs.org

• the more humdrum aspects of life do not make for gripping reading. To render them compelling, a writer must describe the universal in eloquent and evocative prose. Alas, Frey's writing suggests that this was not an option, and he came up with something else.

  Anna Quindlen

  Reading, Writing, Gripping

• I'm boggled by the idea of being an only child. I know nothing at all (I'm happy to say) about having had a cold and withholding mother, about being divorced. The more I've been writing novels, each novel I've written has become successively less grounded in anything approaching autobiography.

  Anna Quindlen

  Mother, Children, Writing

  Source: urbanmoms.ca

• You realize that especially when you're writing a book like this, looking back on your life, that there's just such a depth of understanding you acquire over time with the help of the people who love you that that's when you can really get down to what you really think and believe.

  Anna Quindlen

  Believe, Book, Love You

  Source: www.pbs.org

• I can't think of anything to write about except families. They are a metaphor for every other part of society.

  Anna Quindlen

  Family, Writing, Thinking

• You write to suit some sense in yourself and trust that that will resonate with a certain wider readership.

  Anna Quindlen

  Writing, Suits, Certain

  Source: urbanmoms.ca

• I think I'm like most novelists in that my books have gotten farther and farther away from autobiography the longer I've been writing them.

  Anna Quindlen

  Book, Writing, Thinking

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