Ellen Hopkins Quotes

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

From the beginning, when I first got an idea for a story and wondered if I could write it, it has always been the story that has driven me.

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking, 'I really want to write a novel.'

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

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

You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.

I'm a writer who likes to be influenced.

I've always kind of wrote when I wanted to. Once I get the idea in my head and get it outlined out, I usually just sit and write until it's done.

I always believed that whatever had to be written would somehow get itself written.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

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

When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.

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.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

I never thought about what I would write. I just come from such a big family of storytellers.

I write what's given me to write.

I wanted to write it long before I wrote Every Night, Josephine! I'd been thinking about it a long time.

I write simply because I hear voices of people in my head who won't give me peace until I convey their stories to the rest of the world. Seriously. They've always been with me. While other girls played with dolls, and my brothers with Hot Wheels, I was busy traveling through space or traipsing through graveyards with my imaginary playmates.

I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.

My most successful books, the ones that I feel the strongest about, are the ones that started with a premise that for me was deeply emotional.