21 Motivational Quotes From Today's Top Authors

21 Motivational Quotes from Today’s Top Authors

Tess

Tess

6 March 2023

“I’m always hoping that I’ll offer something that will help someone who is feeling lost or unseen or desperate. I think literature has a power, it can rescue people at the right time.” – Diana Evans

 

What you must do is write what you feel. Analyse your feelings. Then take those feelings and blow them up huge.” – Lee Child

 

“A novel is not true, but a good novel is deeply true.” – Eleanor Catton

 

“In the end you have to find your own way. No one wants to read a poor imitation of a great writer.” – Bonnie Garmus

 

“If you start with characters: What does your character want? How does your character get it? What stands in the way of them getting it? How do they work around that? What are the consequences of their actions? What are the consequences of those consequences? The book writes itself.” – Marlon James

 

“I write anywhere I happen to be. Sometimes it’s curled up on a sofa, sometimes at my desk and other times on a train or in a busy café. I’ve even written in my office loos while on a deadline! But if I had a choice, I would write at the crack of dawn, with a steaming mug of tea beside me, in a warm shed at the bottom of a garden as the world is just waking up. I think that’s when the real magic happens.” – Alexandra Page

 

“When I write a novel all kinds of things that interest me go into it — it’s ultimately down to the readers, rather than me, to decide in which corners they want to shine the light of their attention.” – Kamila Shamsie

 

“I think every big publisher said no to me. It was rejection after rejection but I could tell I was getting better: the feedback was becoming kinder and I learned from each miss.” – Dilly Court

 

“I usually start with a situation that involves some sort of tension or some uncomfortable situation my character is in. I’m not exactly sure how the character will get out of it or what challenges there will be. I often set out on a path, and then at some point, I have to backtrack and go a different way.” – Lily King

 

“Language is older and richer than we are and when you go in there and let go and listen, it’s possible to discover something way beyond and richer than your conscious self.” – Claire Keegan

 

“We write the stories we are most adept at telling at the time they are ready to come out of us. I think that can happen at any age.” – Leila Mottley

 

“Success did come to me later, but that was okay, I could feel myself getting better with each story or book.” – Elizabeth Strout

 

“It seems that we live in an age where reality itself has become a luxury good: something that can be bought and imposed on others. Literature is tremendously important in this context: it encourages us to think critically and productively about the connection between fiction and truth – and how stories, more than merely mimicking reality, can shape it.” – Hernan Diaz

 

“I think what you want to have in a book is this sense that it was written in one breath.” – Yann Martel

 

“I guess what a novel can do is take you to a particular social world and particular relationship dynamics that play out in a way that makes you feel like you’re standing in the doorway, looking in and observing exactly what’s happening.” – Sally Rooney

 

“It was never hard to reconnect with the world because the world was inside me.” – Douglas Stuart

 

“It takes away a lot of my own fear when I remember that all I have to do is show up at my desk and try and keep trying to write words that actually convey my feelings, that it will take time and I’ll feel frustrated and like a failure but if I keep at it, the words on my screen will eventually be what I’m actually trying to say.” – Marian Keyes

 

“Until that book [Evelyn Hugo], my trajectory felt a little random. Once I wrote it, I looked back and thought, ‘This is who I am, this is who I’ve always been, this is what it was leading towards.’” – Taylor Jenkins Reid

 

If you’re a writer, you must be able to summon empathy for all your characters, even and especially the despicable ones.” – Hanya Yanagihara

 

“The key is to try to stay open, to stay comfortable enough and free enough in one’s own life that you don’t get too self-absorbed, too busy, too blinded to the wonders all around you.” – Anthony Doerr

Tess

Tess

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