Anthony Marra Quotes

A writer is always, always searching, even against her will, against all her better instincts, for the thread of a story. Everything is fodder. Everything is fuel. You can feel it coming on like the tingling of a sore throat. The brain never stops struggling to reshape every experience and feeling into a coherent narrative.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

You become a better writer by writing. You become a better travel writer by writing about travel.

I never have found out all I want to know about writing and realize I never will.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

Doing interesting things and then writing about them is the best way to become a good writer.

I think all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

I started writing when I was about thirteen.

True confession time: I never know where a book is going. I get a gut feeling the story is there, then pursue it with the enthusiasm of a hunting tiger on a trail. If I knew where I was going, I'd get bored out of my mind and stop writing.

I never thought about writing a novel until I was 13, and that happened by chance. I was on school holidays, and I was bored, and I thought I just wanted to do something to occupy myself instead of asking, 'What can I do, mum? Entertain me.' I started, and it really just took over, and I realised, 'Wow, this is an amazing experience.'

I have dreamt of being an author since the age of 14, and writing about my experiences has always been a part of digesting an experience and sharing it with others.

I've been writing in some way, shape, or form for as long as I can remember.

I've been writing since I was really young.

In Sydney, I gave what was billed as a masterclass to bright students of writing at the University of Sydney. But the term 'masterclass' was possibly over-egging the pudding. All I could do was pass on some lessons from my own life, and the most obvious is that if you want to be a writer, you must first have been a reader.

When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen.

Read a lot. Write a lot. Have fun.

Writing in public gives you that access to a junkyard of details all around you.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

Most everything that happens to me in any significant sense finds its way into my fiction.