Quotes About Writing

You hear about people who write 15 to 20 novels. How do they do it? You just gotta do it.

While writing 'Bhavesh,' I pretty much chewed up every single graphic novel I could get my hands on, so all the way from the entire 'Batman' series, Frank Miller's 'Batman,' Ed Brubaker's 'Batman,' Scott Snyder's 'Batman,' all the way through 'Daredevil' to '100 Bullets,' through so many other graphic novels.

I write novels and other things.

I spend about a year between novels.

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.

In effect I am not a novelist, but rather a failed essayist who started to write novels because he didn't know how to write essays.

I don't write romance novels.

I have assiduously avoided calling my books novels.

I never see a novel as a film while I'm writing it. Mostly because novels and films are so different, and I'm such an internal novelist.

I have written every one of my novels to convince somebody of something.

I think of my novels as entertainments.

I have always loved to read, and now that I have penned 10 novels and a few magazine articles, I have fallen seriously in love with writing stories and seeing them go out into the world. It's magical, you know?

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

I don't really consider any of my novels 'crime' novels.

I'm a novelist, that's how I make my livelihood, and I concentrate on the novels.

I wrote one terrible manuscript after another for a decade and I guess they gradually got a little less terrible. But there were many, many unpublished short stories, abandoned screenplays and novels... a Library of Congress worth of awful literature.

When I was in my early 20s, my dream was to write mystery novels. I wanted to do what my favourite crime writer, Ross Macdonald, did - crank out a book a year. The only problem - and it was a considerable one - was that I stank.

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

I never plan my novels because if I know what is going to happen, it bores me rigid. I let the story tell itself.

I want a career writing these novels that I can be proud of. And then I want one as a screenwriter.

My first two novels were set in the past, and that freed me up in a lot of ways; it allowed me to find my way into my story and my characters through research.

I'd probably still be a financial journalist now if it weren't for writing novels. Mmm. Fun! I'm much happier writing novels!

I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature... Never again another seven-volume saga.