Quotes About Writing

Writing on March 15, 44 B.C., she reported that Julius Caesar had been assassinated

Finally, the princeps wrote (or revised) his will, complex and surprising; it took up two notebooks

the writing of a monumental history of Rome, from the foundation to 9 B.C.

I fear dying in the middle of a book. It would be so annoying to write 80 000 words and not get to the end. I'm phobic about it. So when I'm writing a book I leave messages all over the house for people to know how the story ends, and then someone can finish it for me.

I vividly remember being 14. That was the age when I started to get happy: I started being a writer and stopped being a loser.

My greatest fear is disappointing the reader, so each book has to be better than the one before.

Their proof-reader tried to kill herself. She shot herself with a gun.

I was with him throughout the whole process: writing the books, finishing them and then the horrible disappointment when nobody was interested. You have no idea what it's like, Susan, being rejected, those letters that turn up in the post with six or seven lines dismissing the work of a whole year.

It's one of the paradoxes of being a writer that, physically, there's not a huge difference between the debut novelist and the international best-seller: they're each stuck in a room with a laptop, too many Jaffa Cakes and nobody to talk to. I once worked

A novel is a container for 80,000 to 90,000 words and you might see it as a jelly mould. You pour them all in and hope they'll set.

I've often been quite tempted to write a book." "You could have the launch party back in jail.

In a way, I think I am writing this for Leo. I have decided to keep a record of my life because I suspect my life will be short. I do not particularly want to be remembered. After all, being unknown has been essential to my work. But I sometimes think of him and I would like him to understand what it was that made me what I am.

Anthony Horowitz

Why do you have to be so bloody uncooperative all the time? Do you have any idea how difficult it is writing these books?

being published. But I'd known Alan Conway for eleven years, or I thought I had, and I found it almost impossible to believe that he could have produced this, all four hundred and twenty pages of it. It was as if he was whispering to me as I lay there in the darkness, telling me something I didn't want to hear.

There's something about Oxford that has always appealed to authors and it seems to me that it has somehow seeped into their work. Think of Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Iris Murdoch and, more recently, Philip Pullman. It's hard to imagine them living anywhere else.

I didn't sleep well that night. I'm used to bad writing. I've looked at plenty of novels that have no hope of being published. But I'd known Alan Conway for eleven years, or I thought I had, and I found it almost impossible to believe that he could have produced this, all four hundred and twenty pages of it. It was as if he was whispering to me as I lay there in the darkness, telling me something I didn't want to hear.

one shindig to the next. I've often wondered how I would have managed if I'd been born with a stammer or chronic shyness. The modern writer has to be able to perform, often to a huge audience. It's almost like being a stand-up comedian except that the questions never change and you always end up telling the same jokes. Whether it's crime in Harrogate

You can hold it right there,' I said. 'I've already told you. You can't talk about people's sexuality like that. I'm not having it and I'm not putting it in the book.' 'You can put what

Mary Westmacott, which was, in fact, Christie's nom de plume.

wanted to remind myself just how terrible it was: the awful language, the use of clichés, its near-pornographic relish. The books must have made Dawn Adams a ton of money, and as I'd learned from my time with Hawthorne, money and murder have a way of going hand in hand.

I thought you'd have known that, you being a TV writer.

We've already agreed that I can't write about Ahmet or Pranav. So presumably I can't write about Maureen or Sky either . . . because they're both women! Or Lucky because he's a dog! At the end of the day, if I listened to you, I'd only write about myself! A book full of middle-aged white writers describing middle-aged white writers being murdered by middle-aged white writers!

He'd forgotten that one day Meadows would read it in my book. 'He was already