Kevin Powers Quotes

Although psychoanalysis has influenced me personally, it has had curiously little influence on my writing. This may be because writers learn from other writers, not from theories.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

Everything that you read is an influence on everything you write, and you want to draw as many elements into your work as you can.

If you're mostly a writer - if your point of departure is writing something - which for a writer/director is sort of where you start, you're really influenced by the writers you love one way or another.

I was able to work out all sorts of attitudes to style and event and character, all of which affected the way I came to think about my own writing. I believe that all good writers are original.

If you want to be a writer, don't worry so much about writing. Read as much as you can. Read as many different writers as you can. Soak up the styles.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

I mean, if you lined up 100 writers, you'd get 100 different ways in which they write. There's no right way or wrong way to do it; it's whatever your process is.

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

Like most writers, I read deeply into the genre in which I write.

Usually I decide on what it is I'm writing next by the books I'm reading.

I know you're supposed to hide your influences, but I suppose I see writing as riffing, really, about whatever you have been reading or thinking about that day or that week.

There is no rule on how to write. Sometimes it comes easily and perfectly; sometimes it's like drilling rock and then blasting it out with charges.

I'm an author who likes assignments, who needs suggestions, ideas I would never have thought of otherwise - then something happens inside my alien head. Other people have to decide whether or not I'm a good writer, but I do have the ability to write in different styles.

I write what's given me to write.

I still write the same way and have the same perspective.

I think there are some writers - like, if you read Kerouac, I think you probably need to take a little break before you sit down to the typewriter because he's the type of writer whose voice infects you.

So one can say that I write all the time, that goes for the lyrics as well.

I'm not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or 'let the characters speak through me,' whatever that might mean.

There are a lot of elements when you're writing, or when I'm writing, that are sitting in the back of your mind. I try to let them stay there, because they find their way in more naturally that way.

People don't stress enough that when they're writing lyrics, they are writing.

When you compose, it's like writing. You're like a writer. You just think all the time.

I was once doing a question and answer period with the novelist Jane Smiley in a bookstore and someone asked us what our processes were and Jane said hers and then I said mine and Jane said, "Well, if I had a student like that I'd force him never to write like that again because you could never write a novel in the way that you write poetry."

I really enjoy English and poetry and writing classes. You do get writer's block when you're writing music, and having inspiration from other great writers is great. You have to look for inspiration because sometimes music isn't the only thing that you can look at.

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.