Verlyn Klinkenborg Quotes

I like looking at a book and asking myself, 'How do I replicate that experience I just had as a reader?'

When I'm writing, I thoroughly enjoy it. It just goes on.

If the reader enters a kind of immersive experience reading a book, then I have to enter a kind of immersive state to do my best work.

Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.

Everything I publish is for my readers.

I think people who create and write, it actually does flow-just flows from into their head, into their hand, and they write it down. It's simple.

Writing is the starting point from which all goodness (and crappiness) flows.

We don't often talk about the fact that writing is all about rhythm. When you get too up in your head, you can lose a lot of your writing. Sometimes what a writer really needs to do is go dancing.

It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

The faster I write the better my output. If I'm going slow, I'm in trouble. It means I'm pushing the words instead of being pulled by them.

All I'm doing is writing it down and putting it in a cadence. Once I get into a cadence, then why should I even stop and wonder what it is? You can do that for the rest of your life, but when it's coming out, you don't want to stop it.

I don't know anything but writing practice, and so what I really do is direct that energy as if it were flowing down a river.

I don't type [when I write] because . . . I often have the feeling that everything flows directly from my right hand.

When I sit down at my writing desk, time seems to vanish. I think it's a wonderful way to spend one's life.

When you're sitting down and you're blocked and you just start writing and something in your mind just clicks, you start seeing connections and so on, you really do feel like you're channeling something else.

That was asking a lot of my readers, I realized, but I was trying to write the novel I would most enjoy decoding.

I don't care if a reader hates one of my stories, just as long as he finishes the book.

One of the pleasures of reading is seeing this alteration on the pages, and the way, by reading it, you have made the book yours.

The better the book the more room for the reader.

Part of my function as a writer is to dream awake. And that usually happens. If I sit down to write in the morning, in the beginning of that writing session and the ending of that session, I'm aware that I'm writing. I'm aware of my surroundings. It's like shallow sleep on both ends, when you go to bed and when you wake up. But in the middle, the world is gone and I'm able to see better.

During those times like in my early years as a writer I could actually write a song in ten minutes because all of a sudden a song is writing itself, I'm just putting down words. It just seem each line that you put down flows with the other ones. It's like writing a love letter you don't think about it, it's something from the heart.

The writer's job is not to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here I am,” but to write a novel, hold it up and say, “Here YOU are.

Writing is a deep-sea dive. You need hours just to get into it: down, down, down. If you're called back to the surface every couple of minutes by an email, you can't ever get back down. I have a great friend who became a Twitterer and he says he hasn't written anything for a year.

Writing is a completely private act. It's in a way like play but very serious play, and sometimes I can escape into the fictional world that I'm creating so fully as to see hours go by without my noticing it. I think that kind of suspension of time and that mindfulness is a real gift.

A lot of times, I'll have a goal, I'll start writing, and I'll end up in some far off place, which is good. It's nice to have a focus, but letting the lyrics write themselves where they need to go is important.