Kate Braverman Quotes

Books aren't made in the way that babies are: they are made like pyramids. There's some long-pondered plan, and then great blocks of stone are placed one on top of the other, and it's back-breaking, sweaty, time consuming work. And all to no purpose! It just stands there in the desert! But it towers over it prodigiously. Jackals piss at the base of it, and bourgeois clamber to the top of it, etc. Continue this comparison.

Beginning writers must appreciate the prerequisites if they hope to become writers. You pay your dues - which takes years.

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

I write books that way - I put a first line down and say, "Where does this go?"

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

I'm always trying. Between every book, I think, 'Well now, it's time to get down to the serious stuff.'

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

It was only after two years' work that it occurred to me that I was a writer. I had no particular expectation that the novel would ever be published, because it was sort of a mess. It was only when I found myself writing things I didn't realise I knew that I said, 'I'm a writer now.' The novel had become an incentive to deeper thinking. That's really what writing is—an intense form of thought.

If you're writing, you're a writer. If you're talking about it or thinking about it, I'm not so sure. Writing is ninety-eight percent work and two percent magic.

A really good day for me is to write my book for about four hours, go to the writing room for about four hours and then maybe come back to the book to finish the day for a few more hours of it.

Writing is hard work. But if you want to become a writer you will become one. Nothing will stop you.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts. You need to start somewhere. Start by getting something-anything-down on paper. A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft-you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft-you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it's loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.

Writing is supposed to be difficult, agonizing, a dreadful exercise, a terrible occupation.

If you ever read one of my books I hope you'll think it looks so easy. In fact, I wrote those chapters 20 times over, and over, and over, and that if you want to write at a good level, you'll have to do that too.

Write, write, write-till your fingers break.

One of the easiest things in the world is not to write... If it were easy, everyone would do it.

I don't think I'll write a large novel again because it was like being in jail for me. Even though that's the funniest book I've ever written, it was the saddest period of my life.

Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.

This is how you do it: you sit down at the keyboard and you put one word after another until its done. It's that easy, and that hard.

I write a book at least three times-once to understand it, the second time to improve the prose, and a third to compel it to say what it still must say.