Quotes from Jean M. Auel

Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.

You learn to write by writing, and by reading and thinking about how writers have created their characters and invented their stories. If you are not a reader, don't even think about being a writer.

I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true.

Writing is the hardest work I've ever done. I'm a mother, I had five children, I was working full-time, I was going to university at night, I got a master's degree in business administration, and I did all those things at the same time--and writing is the hardest thing.

If you want to fall in love, you can't hold everything in. You have to open up, take that risk. You'll be hurt sometimes, but if you don't, you'll never be happy. The one you find may not be the kind of woman you expected to fall in love with, but it wont matter, you'll love her for exactly what she is.

The earth we leave is beautiful and rich; it gave us all we needed for all the generations we have lived.

Very often people come up with spiritual beliefs to answer questions. Why did my child get sick? Why did the rain come and flood the river? People don't--and still don't--have those answers, so we try to come up with reasons.

Women could be trying at times, but they often brought warmth and pleasure to a man's fire.

The first draft of the entire six book series was written at one time, in one single burst of creative energy, over a four month period of 12 to 16 hour days of sustained writing, during which I did almost nothing else except additional research. I thought at the time that it would be one novel, Earth's Children, but it fell into six parts. It was only on rewriting that I realized that I had instead written an in-depth outline for a six book series.

Right now, if I were lost in the wilderness, I feel that I could probably make it out, find a way to get home. I've learned a lot, and it's been great fun. Every single one of the caves in this last book I've been in--except for one very small one--and they really are exceptional.

The Clan lived by unchanging tradition. Every facet of their lives from the time they were born until they were called to the world of the spirits was circumscribed by the past. It was an attempt at survival, unconscious and unplanned except by nature in a last-ditch effort to save the race from extinction, and doomed to failure. They could not stop change, and resistance to it was self-defeating, anti-survival.

After years of a very busy life, I found myself with no commitments. It was a very free-floating state that was open, perhaps, to new ideas.

I don't want to be known for my face. I want to be known for my work.

I don't know why my books are so popular. I'm writing to please only myself, a book I would like to read.

When I first started I was obsessed--putting in 16 hours a day, seven days a week, and loving it. My in-laws told my husband that perhaps he should get some help for me. Once the book was published it was OK because writers can be a little crazy.

There's no such thing as a writer's block. I get inspiration from working. I just have to push through and finally it'll start to come together again. The brain is always going, you just don't realize it.

It's harder to kill people. The empathy is so much stronger that the mind must invent new reasons. But, if we can somehow link it to our own survival, the mind will make the devious twists and turns necessary to rationalize it. We're very good at that.

I collect art. That's my weakness. I keep saying, "We've got to put a moratorium on it, we don't have room," but I keep buying it.

I love being able to learn whatever I want and earn a living at it. Research is fun; writing is hard work.

Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy.

I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.

Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.

My fiction is reviewed by the mainstream press, by science fiction periodicals, romance magazines, small press publications and various other journals, including some usually devoted to archaeological and other science material.

She lifted the drooping muzzle with both hands... It was a special embrace saved for special occasions.