Bobbie Ann Mason Quotes

I was 12. Our, teacher made us write an autobiography and I realised that I wasn't very interesting. I began to make things up, and that's when I thought maybe I was a writer, or at least a fiction writer.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

I write in a rush of memory.

Stories develop from things I read and also from my own experiences and experiences of people I know.

To my mind, forgetting is a risky strategy for living. Memory is essential to us. It is DNA. We need to remember, and we need to imagine. That's why we have books, writing, fiction.

I actually feel that the different kinds of stories come out of different parts of my brain.

I just simply write as it moves me. I may be writing about a book or a movie or a person, places where I've been or something I've done. Or politics. It's going to what's on my mind at the moment.

The songs are not necessarily autobiographical. A lot of songs are a combination of influences. It might be some part of my life, or something I've felt, or something somebody's told me. It all comes together.

The stories I write are often literal to events that have happened or observations that I've made, and sometimes they're fantastical.

By the time I sit down and face the blank page I am raring to go. I tell it as if I'm talking to my best friend or one of my grandchildren.

If a writer stops observing, he is finished.

Memory is the way we keep telling ourselves our stories - and telling other people a somewhat different version of our stories.

A notion for a story is for me a confluence of real events, historical perhaps, or from my own memory to create an exciting fusion.

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.'

Obviously any fiction is going to be a combination of what is invented, what is overheard, what is experienced, what is experienced by people close to you, what you are told, what you have read, all mixed together into this kind of soup which, like any good soup, at the end you cannot really distinguish the ingredients.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

I fill up the well of stories in my head - without ever knowing I'm doing it.

I wrote 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator' when I was 22 or 23. These people and that world have been evolving in me for a while. It's such a shift not to be in that world.

Do you love this story? If you love it, then you've got to write it.

As a writer, I absorb stories, allow them to churn within my own head and heart - often for years - until I find a way of telling them that fits both my time and temperament.

I don't think any good book is based on factual experience. Bad books are about things the writer already knew before he wrote them.

I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

When I'm writing my blog, I think of myself at 13 years old, back in St. Louis, daydreaming about Hollywood.