STEPHEN KING
“Until you understand why you write, you’ll have a hard time figuring out who you are as a writer.”
JAMES GRIPPANDO
“There’s only one person a writer should listen to, pay attention to. It’s not any damn critic. It’s the reader.”
William Styron
“I am sure that in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt. It’s a sign, I suppose, of life’s decreasing livableness as life that people should feel it possible to make themselves felt in so few other ways. The non-essential writer never gets past that wish.”
Elizabeth Bowen
“A good picture book can almost be whistled. … All have their own melodies behind the storytelling.”
Margaret Wise Brown
“It’s a sad fact about our culture that a poet can earn much more money writing or talking about his art than he can by practicing it.”
W.H. Auden
“I’m a teller of stories. I put bloody skins on my back and dance around the fire, and I say what the hunt was like. It’s not erudite; it’s not intellectual. I sail, run dogs, ride horses, play professional poker and tell stories about the stuff I’ve been through. And I’m still a romantic; I still want Bambi to make it out of the fire.”
Gary Paulsen
“It isn’t an inquisition; it’s an exploration, usually an exploration into the past. So I think the gentlest question is the best one, and the gentlest is, ‘And what happened then?'”
Studs Terkel, on interviewing