Writing Potential Quotes

What drove me to do 'Dead Wake' was that after doing the most preliminary of reading and scoping out what kinds of materials might be available in archives and so forth, I realized that this book - the research, the writing - would present me with a rare opportunity to explore to a full extent the potential for suspense in a nonfiction work.

I don't know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

I don't think anything you've written is immortal as yet.

What had happened was this. When still young, I had gotten the idea from somewhere that I might be able to write... Maybe the deadly notion came from liking to read so much. Maybe I was in love with the image of being a writer. Whatever. It had been a really bad idea. Because I couldn't write, at least not by the bluntly and frequently expressed standards of anyone in a position to offer any encouragement and feedback.

Writers tell stories better, because they've had more practice, but everyone has a book in them. Yes, that old cliche.

Good writers are often excellent at a hundred other things, but writing promises a greater latitude for the ego.

I've got more ideas for books than I'll ever be able to use in my lifetime. I'm very fortunate like that.

It's probably true that everyone has a book in them, although it may not be a very good one.

I knew that I was a good writer in high school and won awards, and I was the editor of my school newspaper. So I knew that I was a good writer and I wanted to somehow capitalize and sort of utilize a talent that I thought I had.

I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word.

If there's an idea I think is really good and I feel like I can write it, then I'll do it.

I'm still only half the writer I hope I will be.

A thousand things to be written had I time: had I power. A very little writing uses up my capacity for writing.

I felt like I was never going to be a great writer. I felt like I was going to be a good writer at best. I wanted to be great at something.

I am only one-eighth the writer I might have been had I contained all the fragmented languages of Trinidad.

It's exciting having a student who is not used to expressing their emotional side and bringing that out in them and see that developing and helping to nurture that. That's an exciting thing. In a class of fifteen there are usually two very good writers, equal to good student writers anywhere in the country. Those two make the class wonderful.

In school, writing was the only thing that really came naturally to me, but it wasn't until college that I realized that I could do it for more than just fun.

People say there's a book in everyone but I'm not sure there is. There might be a pamphlet in me.

Creative writing lessons can be very useful, just like music lessons can be useful. To say, as Hanif Kureishi did, that 99.9% of students are talentless is cruel and wrong. I believe that certain writers like to believe they arrived into the world with special, unteachable powers because it is good for the ego.

Maybe you could be a great writer - maybe even good enough to write a book or articles in a newspaper - but you might not know it until you write that English paper - that English class paper that's assigned to you.

I tend to be a subscriber to the idea that you have everything you need by the time you're 12 years old to do interesting writing for most of the rest of your life - certainly by the time you're 18.

Occasionally a student writer comes up with something really beautiful and moving, and you won't know for years if it was an accident or the first burst of something wonderful.

Still, I kept writing. I had no guarantee that I would someday win awards for writing. Heavens, the only person during that time who seemed to think I could write something worth publishing was my loyal husband. But I always remembered the professor from graduate school who urged me to write and who recommended me for that first writing assignment in 1964. When I protested to Sara Little that I didn't want to add another mediocre writer to the world, she gently reminded me that if I didn't dare mediocrity, I would never write anything at all.

Being taken seriously, for a young writer, is a wonderful form of encouragement, but at the same time, I don't think one should ever feel like attempting a kind of artistic endeavor is beyond your scope just because of age or inexperience.

Very few writers of distinction in fact were outstanding as undergraduates.