Top 28 Quotes & Sayings by Scott Spencer

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American author Scott Spencer.

Last updated on December 3, 2024.

Scott Spencer is an American author who has written thirteen novels. He also wrote the screenplay for the 1993 movie Father Hood. Two of Spencer's novels, Endless Love and Waking the Dead, have been adapted into films. Endless Love was first adapted into a motion picture by Franco Zeffirelli in 1981, and a second adaptation by Shana Feste was released in 2014. Waking the Dead was produced by Jodie Foster and directed by Keith Gordon in 2000. The novels Endless Love and A Ship Made of Paper have both been nominated for the National Book Award, with Endless Love selling over 2 million copies. Spencer has heavily panned both film adaptations of Endless Love.

American - Author | Born: September 1, 1945

Source: Wikipedia

If a book isn't teaching me something, pulling something out of me, then it will be dull for me and the reader.

Scott Spencer

It may be time for serious literary novelists to take back some of the subject matter we abandoned to hack novelists and the movies.

Scott Spencer

Contempt is a dangerous emotion, luring us into believing that we understand more than we do. Contempt causes us to jeer rather than speak, to poke at rather than touch.

Scott Spencer

With writing, you really have to have faith. You have to have some sort of confidence that if you keep at it, you will get where you need to go, because there are so many points where a rational person would quit.

Scott Spencer

I surely don't think ignorance is bliss. But like everything else that has survived thousands of years of human evolution, ignorance - like denial, self-delusion, and magical thinking - seems to have its uses.

Scott Spencer

When I look back at my life and think about what really happened, my memory is obscured by the stories I've created out of those incidents. In stories, as reality melds with art, the result sometimes feels truer than real life.

Scott Spencer

Like most people, I find my own experiences - and my emotional responses to those experiences - fascinating and mysterious, even those that are a bit shaming and a little repellent.

Scott Spencer

I try to keep a steady pace with my writing. I have found that super-productive days are usually followed by two and even three days when I can hardly write a word. I used to try for 1000 words a day; now I am high-fiving myself after 500.

Scott Spencer

I was raised in a house on the far South Side of Chicago, in a development erected on a landfill made from slag and other industrial by-products a few years after World War II.

Scott Spencer

It could be said that all armed conflicts are a ludicrous and shameful waste of lives, but World War I has a special place in the history of futility - a war without clear purpose, a war whose resolution would ultimately make the world a far worse place.

Scott Spencer

That's sort of the amazing thing about writing something down and then having it printed and published - it's frozen. It's there. It's set. It's in ink. It's done. Nothing changes it.

Scott Spencer

Where I live, it's better to write in the morning because the night is really, really, really dark, and I do believe you'd go mad if you weren't asleep for most of it.

Scott Spencer

Writers are stewards of the culture. Publishers, librarians, bookstore owners. We're all in this together. To write books that are gripping, important, that people want to have, is to keep publishing alive.

Scott Spencer

By the time I was 14, my most burning ambition was to leave my home, leave my neighborhood, leave my city. I kept it a secret wish. It was easier done than said. It wasn't only that I wanted to leave Chicago - I wanted to live in New York City. And I did - for a time.

Scott Spencer

Everything in a novel has to be intentional, even the things that aren't.

Scott Spencer

As a writer, I try to turn my feelings and experiences into a different form entirely, something that gives me mastery over them and also makes them meaningful to other people.

Scott Spencer

No pain could match the emptiness of separation, no agony rivaled the unreality of not being with her.

Scott Spencer

I try to know as much as I can about a book before the beginning, but I never know exactly where it's going to end.

Scott Spencer

On a ship thats made of paper, I would sail the seven seas. (Just to be with you)

Scott Spencer

The trouble with excuses, however, is that they become inevitably difficult to believe after they’ve been used a couple of times.

Scott Spencer

You're all I care about," I said. "No. And me. The person I am when I'm with you, the way I see myself and know myself. That person who lives only when I'm with you.

Scott Spencer

Everything creepy and Southern isn't Faulknerian, just like everything annoying isn't Kafkaesque.

Scott Spencer

It was a once in a lifetime thing. I hate to think it but I bet it's true. It's too bad for us that our once in a lifetime happened when were too young to handle it.

Scott Spencer

The only things I regret, and the only things I'll ever regret are things I didn't do. In the end, that's what we mourn. The paths we didn't take. The people we didn't touch.

Scott Spencer

I thought of my mother (...). Freud wrote that no man is secure in the love of his mother can ever be a failure. Well, I had been busy proving that theory wrong.

Scott Spencer

I never felt so large and important as I did when being in love was everything. I saw you walking a foot above the earth and I remembered that was where I used to walk.

Scott Spencer

A novelist is someone who sits around the house all day in his underwear, trying not to smoke.

Scott Spencer

All I wanted was what I'd already had. That exultation, that love. It was my one real home; I was a visitor everywhere else.

Scott Spencer