John Green Quotes About Writing

Quotes about: Writing

• This is what I love about novels - both reading them and writing them. They jump into the abyss to be with you where you are.

  John Green

  Reading, Writing, Where You Are

  "An Evening of Awesome at Carnegie Hall". nerdfighteria.info. January 15, 2013.

• Sometimes, you read a book and it fills you with this weird evangelical zeal, and you become convinced that the shattered world will never be put back together unless and until all living humans read the book.

  John Green

  Stars, Real, Reading

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.33, Penguin

• You do not immortalize the lost by writing about them. Language buries, but does not resurrect.

  John Green

  Death, Real, Writing

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.68, Penguin

• Writing is something you do alone. It's a profession for introverts who wanna tell you a story but don't wanna make eye contact while telling it

  John Green

  Writing, Eye, Stories

• Whenever I'm asked what advice I have for young writers, I always say that the first thing is to read, and to read a lot. The second thing is to write. And the third thing, which I think is absolutely vital, is to tell stories and listen closely to the stories you're being told.

  John Green

  Writing, Thinking, Advice

  John Green (2012). “An Abundance of Katherines”, p.216, Penguin UK

• Writing does not resurrect. It buries.

  John Green

  Writing, Doe

  John Green (2012). “The Fault in Our Stars”, p.152, Penguin

• What I eventually realized is that the real business of books is not done by awards committees or people who turn trees into paper or editors or agents or even writers. We're all just facilitators. The real business is done by readers.

  John Green

  Real, Book, Writing

• [This] is very important to remember when reading or writing or talking or whatever: You are never, ever choosing whether to use symbols. You are choosing which symbols to use.

  John Green

  Reading, Writing, Talking

• Writing, or at least good writing, is an outgrowth of that urge to use language to communicate complex ideas and experiences between people. And that's true whether you're reading Shakespeare or bad vampire fiction-reading is always an act of empathy. It's always an imagining of what it's like to be someone else.

  John Green

  Reading, Writing, Ideas

• That's how writing works, at least for me: even the stuff that doesn't work out gets funneled into the stuff that does work out.

  John Green

  Writing, Work Out, Doe

• Here's my answer to the very real existential crisis that grips me midway through everything I've ever tried to do: I think stories help us fight the nihilistic urges that constantly threaten to consume us.

  John Green

  Real, Writing, Fighting

• Go spit in the face of our inevitable obsolescence and finish your @#$&ng novel.

  John Green

  Writing, Faces, Obsolescence

• We're professional worriers. You're constantly imagining things that could go wrong and then writing about them.

  John Green

  Writing, Imagining Things

• One of the pitfalls about writing about illness is that it is very easy to imagine people with cancer as either these wise-beyond-their-years creatures or these sad-eyed tragic people. And the truth is, people living with cancer are very much like people who are not living with cancer. They're every bit as funny and complex and diverse as anyone else.

  John Green

  Wise, Cancer, Writing

• My interest as a writer is not in reflecting actual human speech, which, of course, does not occur in sentences and is totally undiagrammable. My interest is in trying to reflect the reality of experience - how we feel when we talk to each other, how we feel when we're engaging with questions that interest us.

  John Green

  Writing, Reality, Trying

  "How John Green Wrote a Cancer Book but Not a 'Bullshit Cancer Book'". Interview with Rebecca J. Rosen, www.theatlantic.com. February 25, 2013.

• When I think about [characters], I like to think of them in their relationships to each other. In the same way, I think that's how humans are ultimately defined. We are our relationships to one another. And a lot of what's interesting about us happens in the context of other people.

  John Green

  Writing, Character, Thinking

• Writing fiction is an inherently political activity because people-even imaginary ones-do not live in vacuums... From Twilight to Romeo and Juliet to The Little Mermaid, no work of the imagination is truly apolitical, because the world and our hopes for it are always part of our stories.

  John Green

  Twilight, Writing, People

• I really think that reading is just as important as writing when you're trying to be a writer because it's the only apprenticeship we have, it's the only way of learning how to write a story.

  John Green

  Reading, Writing, Thinking

  YouTube Chanel "vlogbrothers"/ "Nov. 26th: Writing Advice (And Notes on Surnameless Tiffany)", www.youtube.com. November 26, 2007.

• Nostalgia is inevitably a yearning for a past that never existed and when I'm writing, there are no bees to sting me out of my sentimentality. For me at least, fiction is the only way I can even begin to twist my lying memories into something true.

  John Green

  Memories, Lying, Writing

• The funny thing about writing is that whether you're doing well or doing it poorly, it looks the exact same. That's actually one of the main ways that writing is different from ballet dancing.

  John Green

  Writing, Funny Things, Dancing

• I never liked writing concluding paragraphs to papers - where you repeat what you've already said with phrases like 'In summation', and 'To conclude'.

  John Green

  Writing, Phrases, Paper

• But I had to kill you, because the only other possible ending was us doing it, which I wasn't really emotionally ready to write about at ten.' 'Fair enough,' I say. 'But in the revision, I want to get some action.

  John Green

  Writing, Want, Revision

  John Green (2013). “Paper Towns”, p.290, A&C Black

• I believe in hope, in what is something called ”radical hope.” I believe there is hope for all of us, even amid the suffering. And that’s why I write fiction, probaby. It’s my attempt to keep that fragile strand of radical hope, to buld a fire in the darkness.r

  John Green

  Believe, Writing, Fire

• In retrospect Hank I don't know why I spent four years writing this book when I could have just made a hit sing-a-ma-jig album.

  John Green

  Book, Writing, Years

• If my public existence does anything worthwhile, hopefully it at least demystifies the author a bit, because I know when I was younger I felt like authors were like wizards or something. Turns out they're total muggles.

  John Green

  Writing, Doe, Muggles

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