Quotes About Writing

I'm a professional writer and I consider it part of my job to publicise my work and these days part of that job is done online.

A vision of the little house in Soho flickered across his mind's eye, his mother at a desk, writing in her journal, with hazy sunlight streaming through the morning windows. The woman inhabited a world he had once thought his own – a world of publishers and reliable suppliers. A London that was confident and competent amid its grey, puddle-strewn streets.

One of my favourite parts of writing is doing the research. It's the door into that magical reading/writing state - the raw material for making the story real.

Having instant feedback on twitter to research material I'm considering is an enormous help.

It's always been important for writers to be disciplined but now even more so. In addition to the traditional displacement activities like cleaning the fridge or eating cake writers are faced with a plethora of online possibilities (some of which may be professionally worthwhile as well as interesting and fun). As a writer it's important to learn how to focus so you can do both as and when you need to.

The new contract between writers and readers is one I'm prepared to sign up to. I've met some fascinating people at events and online. Down with the isolation of writers I say! And long live Twitter.

You spill a lot of beans in historical fiction. Crime fiction is about spilling no beans at all. You spill the least beans you possibly can. So because I had already written historical fiction before I was really good at the spilling beans section, but the new skill I had to learn when I was writing Brighton Belle was difficult. I had to avoid the equivalent of shouting, "this character's a murderer! Look who did it!.

The space where I write is in my head, I suppose.

The hard fact is that writing is available to readers because of market factors as much as particular writing talent.

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in reading and writing since the advent of the Gutenberg press.

For a writer it's a genuinely interesting and hopefully profitable era that makes a variety of books available to a variety of readers, extending both what's available and who gets to read it.

Archive material is vital to the writer of historical fiction.

Writing is such a solitary occupation that it takes a long time to build up a group of professional peers with whom you genuinely identify.

I know a lot of writers, and everyone works differently, but this is something that we truly have in common across all genres - the fiction has to be real inside your head.

Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre.

A word out of place or an interesting choice of vocabulary can spawn a whole character.

Being a writer is a more difficult job than people imagine.

I've been obsessed with stories since I was a kid so it's no surprise that I ended up writing for a living.

I love writing, and just as much, I love undertaking research.

For (D.L) Mayfield, "Parenting has made me eschew religiosity in exchange for a real relationship - full of questioning - of a God I hope is more loving than I can possibly imagine. I don't think we talk often enough about how children both make it essential and impossible to write. Madeleine for me is a patron saint of this.

as Flannery O'Connor put it, "In the act of writing, one sees that the way a thing is made, controls and is inseparable from the whole meaning of it. The form of a story gives it meaning which any other form would change."6

I'd like to thank all the pizza and chocolate I consumed during the writing of this novel. This book wouldn't exist without you. In particular, I'd like to call out a slice of balsamic tomato from Luigi's Pizzeria for being my muse.

I think my prose reads as if English were my second language. By the time I get to the end of a paragraph, I'm dodging bullets and gasping for breath.

I never wanted to be a literary writer. I wanted to be an entertainer. All I wanted was to give what a lot of writers had given me: a good time on a bad day.