Eden Robinson Quotes

If they won't write the kind of books we like to read we shall have to write them ourselves.

They say that every writer, they write about himself, and I think that to a certain extent that is true. But also we are creators of fiction.

I wrote a book called ‘Dancing The Dream’. It was more autobiographical than Moonwalk, which I did with Mrs. Onassis. It wasn’t full of gossip and scandal and all that trash that people write, so I don’t think people paid much attention to it, but it came from my heart. It was essays, thoughts and things that I’ve thought about while on tour

My last book was speculative. I just don't quite know what I am doing. But I'll get there. I have a list of things I would love to write.

... in nine out of ten cases the original wish to write is the wish to make oneself felt[ellipsis in source] the non-essential writer never gets past that wish.

I feel that I'm an essayist and that my best work gets done in that form. I wanted to do a book where the essays could exist on their own terms. A book that was neither a book of essays that were shoehorned into a memoir, nor [one where] the essays had been published elsewhere first, [because] then they would kind of bear the marks of those publications.

I consider myself an essayist and a fiction writer. In the essays, I certainly have been influenced by some of the leading science essayists. Like Loren Eiseley, Stephen Jay Gould, Lewis Thomas.

After all, I believe it is the style of thought entirely, and the style of expression, which makes the difference in books.

I rarely write in my own voice except in book reviews and memoirs; otherwise, I am writing in mediated voices, modulated in terms of the characters whom the voices express.

I would willingly pass my life writing and re-writing the same book - that one book every writer carries within him - the image of his own soul.

I began by doing book reviews on the typewriter and then went over to short stories on the machine, meanwhile sticking to pencil for poetry.

Nay, what is worse, perhaps turn poet, which, they say, is an infectious and incurable distemper.

When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.

I think each writer has to seek her most energetic prose style. She has to find a way to write so that nobody can deny it.

I'm probably the only bestselling author you know who's written more books than she's read.

To a great extent, I still write for myself, write what amuses me. Fortunately, I have a quirky sort of strange sense of humor that appeals to other people and that's good. I still sort of write for myself though there are some areas of the book I feel I have to put in and I feel I have to deliver.

I feel like they are two different things, and when I write books, they're just books. If they can be movies that's okay. But I would write a novel that couldn't be a film.

I am far less interested in serving as a change agent than in functioning as a prose artist, whether it's fiction or nonfiction.

I thought, if I write a book that is not a retelling of Pride and Prejudice, it's not going to mean that I will not get any criticism. I might as well write the book that I want to write.

Nonfiction is easy and fiction is hard.

I thought that I wasn't an essayist because I just didn't see myself in a lot of the essays that were popular at the time. That's why I joined the poetry program in grad school.

Little by little, writers develop their own styles, each as unique as a fingerprint.

You have to surrender to your mediocrity, and just write. Because it's hard, really hard, to write even a crappy book. But it's better to write a book that kind of sucks rather than no book at all, as you wait around to magically become Faulkner. No one is going to write your book for you and you can't write anybody's book but your own.

I begin by writing paragraphs that don’t have an immediate relation to a plot. The sound of the story comes first.

Advice to a new writer: There are no rules in this profession. Do what is good for you. Read books and watch films that stimulate your writing. In your writing, go where the pain is; go where the pleasure is; go where the excitement is. Believe in your own original approach, voice, characters, story. Ignore critics. Have nerve. Be stubborn.