Top 1119 Quotes & Sayings by Jodi Picoult - Page 19

The question I hate the most is "How did you DO it - write novels and raise your children simultaneously!" I mean, do MALE authors get asked that??

I don't base my books on my life (thank goodness) and I don't pick the topic first. In fact, the topic picks me - via a question I can't answer as a mom, a wife, a woman, an American. I find myself wondering "What if..." and it blossoms into a whole novel.

I have always written about subjects that engage me - questions I can't answer myself. They apparently tend to be big moral and ethical issues!

I think my writing has become "cleaner."

Have a conversation with your family about your end-of-life wishes while you are healthy. No one wants to have that discussion... but if you do, you'll be giving your loved ones a tremendous gift, since they won't have to guess what your wishes would have been, and it takes the onus of responsibility off of them.

Sometimes when you find something you didn't really realize you were looking for, you just don't know how to react.

Everyone still deserves to have their say.

To me gay rights is the last civil right that we have not granted in America and I think it's an enormous embarrassment.

If you don't believe in yourself, and you don't have the fortitude to make that dream happen, why should the hotshots in the publishing world take a chance on you? I don't believe that you need an MFA to be a writer, but I do think you need to take some good workshops.

Any time you put on the mouthpiece of somebody that you're not, there's a professional responsibility to get it right. I did a great deal of research in both of those arenas.

To me, a good event is governed by the audience.

Hopefully, more and more people will come to understand that a child who's "different from" is not one who is "lesser than."

There are certain things that I'll hear about and that I think will make a great book and I put it in a file. Sometimes it's a situation that interests me, and I don't even realize what I'm trying to say about it until I get closer to it. Sometimes the book after that I've written 125 pages of, and I can tell you what the book is after that. I just sort of have a linear progression, but more than anything, the topics land in your lap. I don't feel that I go out searching for them.

I never lose sight of the fact that before I was a writer, I was a teacher. I still am. My classroom's just gotten a little bigger.

I have the most devoted and loyal following. I could probably type up my grocery list and they'd all want to read it. I love that they're willing to let me go wherever I need to go as an author, and they're happy to come along for the ride as the reader.

I can get 400 pages down the road and still not know the answer. What I do know is that I have really examined every facet of the situation, and I may not have changed my opinion but I have definitely forced myself to explore why it's my opinion.

Often, when the last page is turned, it will haunt you.

I think that different things sell in different countries.

I try really hard to ask people to take a look at their bookshelves. Are there female writers on it? Gay writers? Writers of color? There should be.

Stem cell research has become such a polarizing issue in America... and I wanted to bring it down to the personal level, instead of the political.

Fiction allows for moral questioning, but through the back door. Personally, I like books that make you think - books you're still wondering about three days after you finish them; books you hand to a friend and say "Read this, so we can talk about it."

The ideas choose me, not the other way around.

I am always consulted about covers, and give feedback, but I am also aware that what causes a customer to pick a book up off a shelf in the UK is very different from what causes a customer to pick a book up in the US.

I haven't run out of ideas yet. Usually while I'm working on a book, I'm doing research for the next one!

A lot of the moms of autistic kids I met are so consumed with being their child's advocate that there's no room for anything else - least of all themselves. It's why so many marriages end in divorce, when a child is diagnosed on the spectrum.

I love meeting my readers - so the more I can talk to at one event the better!

I love getting fan mail. Often, as a writer, you never know what your readers think of a book... you get critical reviews and sales figures, but none of that is the same as knowing you've made a person stay up all night reading, or helped them have a good cry, or really touched their life.

I think this is every mother's worst nightmare - something dreadful happening to her child.

I don't want to tell people what to think. I'm the least qualified person in the world for that. If I'd go around pretending to be the expert on everything, I'd become Dan Brown, and I don't understand that. We all do our research if we're good writers, and we all work hard to get it right, but that doesn't mean we're experts in the field. The best we can do is challenge people to learn the facts themselves.

I don't believe in writer's block. Most of writer's block is having too much time on your hands. My mantra is that you can always edit a bad page; you can't edit a blank page.

Write a living will. And become an organ donor!

You want to write something as good as what you've read.

A lot of the hallmark behaviors of autism - flat affect, stimming, not looking someone in the eye - could very easily be misinterpreted as signs of guilt.

I don't write the same book over and over - I think if I did that, I would stop writing. I couldn't write a series with the same character, and I couldn't write a romance novel over and over again that takes place at a different beach every year. That's not who I am.

For me, every book is a journey - questioning a really difficult topic that most people don't want to talk about, much less write about. And that's what I need; that works for me as a writer.

Many people have a novel inside them, but most don't bother to get it out.

I start by mulling a question and before I know it, a whole drama is unfolding in my head. Often, an idea sticks before I know what I'm going to do with it.

The way I challenge myself is by writing something that really engages me, that doesn't have an easy answer, and isn't always an easy book to write.

In Poland, for a while, my books all had cartoons on the cover. I trust my publishers in each country to know what works in their individual markets.