Barbara Kingsolver Quotes

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

If a man could give birth it would be to a book - it's an 18-month gestation period.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

A friend of mine who writes history books said to me that he thought that the two creatures most to be pitied were the spider and the novelist - their lives hanging by a thread spun out of their own guts. But in some ways I think writers of fiction are the creatures most to be envied, because who else besides the spider is allowed to take that fragile thread and weave it into a pattern? What a gift of grace to be able to take the chaos from within and from it to create some semblance of order.

She said writting novels was like childbirth: if you truly remembered how awful it got, you'd never do it again.

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

Writing is just work-there's no secret. If you dictate or use a pen or type or write with your toes-it's still just work.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

[Writing is like fishing]. You don't bow because you made the fish. That's the difference. If you know that, then you bow for your labor.You crafted, you worked, you put in those hours so that you could catch that fish. But you didn't make that fish. You just caught the fish. That will help you stay humble and bow for the right reason and be very lucid about the work you do.

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

I felt giving birth was the most creative act of all my creative acts - literally creation!

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.

I think writing is the most underrated thing in Hollywood.

Writing is never, ever easy but I wake up every morning grateful for the gift of being able to do this.

Sometimes writing a novel is not unlike having a baby. You'd have to ask a female novelist to compare the pain.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

Writing for me is quite a plastic form, a kind of mental sculpture, although that sounds weird. It acquires its character and its depth as it goes along.

I enjoy writing. I enjoy that kind of process.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

I am always trying to write.

Being a writer is not the point. Writing is.

Songwriting is a burst of inspiration and then a long bit of work and a tremendous bit of desperation.