Quotes About Writing

I worked on 'Always and Forever, Lara Jean' for a few months before I breathed a word of it my editor or agent.

Wimbledon fortnight is always a testing time for the home worker. I spend most of it on the phone to my writing partner pretending to chat about character motivation when actually I'm checking if he's working - listening out for any telltale bleeps from the line-call machine off the TV in the background.

Whenever I write about immigration, I hear heart-wrenching stories of computer workers who are unemployed and facing severe hardship.

As a child, I had no interest in science whatsoever - then I started writing and recognized how relevant it was. My first book about science and medicine captured the world of organ transplantation in 1989 from the points of view of all of the participants - scientists, surgeons, social workers, organ recipients and even donor families.

To me, the greatest invention of my lifetime is the laptop computer and the fact that I can be working on a book and be in an airport lounge, in a hotel room, and continue working; I fire up my laptop, and I'm in exactly the same place I was when I left home - that, to me, is a miracle.

The only way to learn and hone your craft is by working hard and writing regularly.

With reporting, if you work hard, you can usually pull something out. But writing humor doesn't respond to working hard, necessarily. I mean, you could just sit there and look at the page all day and maybe something will come.

People still struggle with this notion of gifted writers somehow being in touch with a higher power, but it's all about showing up and doing the job, meeting deadlines, working hard.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

I spent my whole life as a writer talking to just the average guy in Los Angeles and Latin America, talking to working people.

I liked the idea of exposing the beams in collaborative novel. And there are many - especially in the crime world - there are many people working together: James Patterson and his stable of sub authors; and then there are like Ken Bruen and Reed Farrel Coleman and Jason Starr.

Writing and producing television very much speaks to the extroverted part of my personality. I love collaboration, the joint effort of hundreds of people working together to create something. But the other part of who I am is extremely introverted. I love being alone and dreaming up ideas and writing novels.

I love writing books, but it's a solitary experience. When I'm on a film set, I'm with a bunch of other artists working together to make one thing.

I think the reason working-class people don't write books is because they are encouraged to believe that only certain people are permitted to write books.

With a few notable exceptions, literary fiction in the U.K. is dominated by an upper and upper middle-class clique who usually have a tin ear for the demotic and who portray working-class characters with, at best, a benevolent condescension.

In Britain, we need to start presenting the option of being a writer in front of black women. We need to present the idea of being a writer into poorer communities because the majority of black people in this country are working class. We need to let working-class people know that their voices are important.

I come from a working-class background and it wasn't in my world to be a writer - I had no direct access to those kind of jobs. But I sensed I wanted to do something like that.

Woodfall wasn't deliberately telling working-class stories, but John Osborne and other writers who were involved with them were writing those stories, which had never really been written before. The working-class person always had to have an accent before, was often a joker, and peripheral. At Woodfall, they were driving the film.

Your mind burns a lot of calories. Writing can feel like a physical workout.

I've always liked the idea of writing a workplace sitcom that was set somewhere where the stakes were really huge and yet you would still have those normal, everyday office moments that everyone can associate with.

I write what I call precinct drama, and I tend to write things set in the workplace. Having an institution which gives a workplace its distinctive identity is really important to creating something which feels different.

I write in pen because it works. A fountain pen is no good for writing in the way I do because I'd have to decide, each time I stopped, how long I was likely to stop for in order to know whether or not to put the cap on. But I never know. So instead, I use a ballpoint - a Montblanc, to be precise - the most comfortably balanced pen I've ever found.

I always overwrite - really awful, long bits of script - and then I trim it down to the bare bones and then add a little bit to colour it in. At the end of all of my stories, I test for wordless comprehension. So I remove the text and see if it works by itself. And if it does, I feel that that's a successful story.

I don't decide where I live. My wife decides. She's a curator of contemporary art, and she works at an art museum, so we go wherever she has a job. All basements look the same, so I can write from whatever basement I happen to be living in.