A Quote by Susan Orlean

Writing about unknown people means I spend a lot of time arguing to the reader about why it's worth knowing about them. That's challenging, but then the piece is pure discovery.

Susan Orlean

Quote Topics

About Arguing Challenging Discovery Knowing Lot Means People Piece Pure Reader Spend Them Then Time Unknown Why Worth Writing

Quote Author

Susan Orlean
American - Journalist
Born: October 31, 1955

I always judge people who spend a lot of time in public office say they care about things, if the day after they leave, they no longer talk about them, then I don't think they cared much about them.

Joe Biden

I’m not a scholar or a psychologist, so I don’t really think about why. But I do think about what it means to sing to and with people, to offer music to them, and to ask them to spend time with me.

Bobby McFerrin

When you have a lot of time, when you're not working a full-time job, you have a lot of time to question things and think about things. Some of it's about romantic relationships, some of it's about drugs, about religion, about this mass of humanity traveling through life doing all this crazy stuff, not really knowing why or for what.

Gary Louris

With a novel, you have to have a story. It's much more important to have it matter to the reader what happens to people, and it has to make sense and end in a way that is satisfying. So I spend a lot more time thinking about that. Then the writing itself usually is easier for me, because I know where it's going.

Dave Barry

I have to have a character worth caring about. I tend not to start writing books about people I don't have a lot of sympathy for because I'm just going to be with them too long.

Richard Russo

But I realized something. About art. And psychiatry. They're both self-perpetuating systems. Like religion. All three of them promise you a sense of inner worth and meaning, and spend a lot of time telling you about the suffering you have to go through to achieve it.

Samuel R. Delany

You've got to be a good reader. So whatever genre that you're interested in, read a lot of books about it and it's better than any kind of writing class you'll ever take. You will absorb techniques and then in a lot of cases you can just start writing using the style of the book or the author that you admire and then your own style will emerge out of that. Be a diligent reader and then try to write seriously, professionally and approach everything in writing in a professional way.

Homer Hickam

My justification is that most people my age spend a lot of time thinking about what they're going to do for the next five or ten years. The time they spend thinking about their life, I just spend drinking.

Amy Winehouse

You spend so much time writing a character the way I did with Buddy Baker and then Green Arrow that you start to care about them. And you almost think of them as people, you know?

Jeff Lemire

When I look at what a writer owes to the reader, it's critical to know that everything you're writing about is not made up in your head. I feel that unless you can document and be certain about what it is that you're writing about, the reader is going to lose faith in your own integrity.

Doris Kearns Goodwin

people in New Orleans really care about food, care about it passionately, can spend hours arguing over whether Antoine's is better than Galatoire's or the other way around ... in New Orleans, there is basically nothing to do but eat and then argue about it.

Nora Ephron

Like most authors, I'm a raging egomaniac. I know that about myself. And I know that, if I had internet access, I would waste countless hours looking up things about myself, writing fake posts about how great I am and arguing with people who don't like my work. It saves me a lot of time and frustration to just stay out of the loop.

Bentley Little

The minute you finish a piece of writing it doesn't belong to you, you don't write it any more, it belongs to you, the reader, the listener, the audience. So the less you know about whether or not this is me talking about my life or this is me talking about your life, I think the better. Then it can belong to you and it can live outside of the moment in which it was conceived.

Kate Tempest

It doesn't matter whether characters are real people or not; if they're not vivid on the page, then the reader doesn't care about them that much, and, if the reader doesn't care about them that much, then they don't care what happens to them.