Lisa Graff Quotes

The Fiction Writer's Co-op has 51 members, from celebrated NYT bestsellers to promising newcomers, and a waiting list.

I want to write a best-selling book.

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

Ilike ideas writers have that I might not have written. Writers are there for a reason... to write for me.

As a writer, I'm always aware of the fact that there are so many books out there.

New fiction writers are a special breed in my estimation, and I never dreamed that so many people would be interested, but I remember being led by God.

We were a very small circle of writers. Everybody brought to the table their own life experience.

I didn't know writers could be real live people, because I never knew any writers.

When you're an established name, you know that a children's book will have a pretty good chance of getting picked up. Like Madonna. It's not that I had this great idea. Actually, in my case, it was a great idea.

The writer's room is a really interesting place to be.

I don't know anyone who is a writer who isn't influenced by the relationships in their life.

I was willing to do anything that Chris Carter wrote.

For a writer, and particularly a writer of my genre, which is the fantastical, I think that it's to my advantage to feel remote from and disconnected from the world of deal making.

I do have the sense that, although there may be no one way to write a novel, there are many novelists who are in fact part of some sort of larger literary community, whether in the form of a writing group or an MFA program, to name two of the more common forms.

Writing is such a solitary thing, so it's nice, when I'm discouraged, to see people still have such faith in fiction.

In my case, I belong to a group of aspiring and practicing biographers in Boston. We meet once a month for a coupla hours. It's become my lifeline - forgive the pun.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

I've seen people around me write books, and somehow they're always in the center of everything that happened; they were the one who made it happen. There's been a lot of those books that didn't really interest me much.

Nothing beats a good part with good writers that you get to come back to year after year.

It's always hard to write and get your words out there, to find an editor, a publisher - readers! - who are going to appreciate them.

I often draw from people in my own experience to base a character on, going back to my days with Mike Leigh.

You never meet other screenwriters because it's such a lonely profession.

I worked on 'Always and Forever, Lara Jean' for a few months before I breathed a word of it my editor or agent.

If I was at school and one of my friends said something funny, I'd write it down in a notebook and take it to the writers meetings. I never told my friends about it. I just thought I could incorporate stuff that was true to life.

As an author and a burgeoning screenwriter, the fact of the matter is I cannot do this alone.