Charles Stross Quotes

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'

I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

My literary career kicked off in 1956 when, as a resident of Swansea, South Wales, I published my first novel, 'Lucky Jim.'

I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'

In the first year, 1988, I wrote and sold 3 novels.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.

I was 40 when I did my first movie.

The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.

I wrote my first novel, 'Deadline,' in 1994 as an experiment.

I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.

Two of the best roles I've ever had have happened in my late 40s.

Find me a first novel that doesn't have parallels with the author's life.

A lot of first novels are written long before they're actually put down on paper.

A career of nearly 40 years, is not very long.

There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again. I was entirely absorbed in that world as I wrote the book [The Kite Runner] and to see the final page of that manuscript whir out of the printer was a very special feeling indeed.

In my long and colorful career, one thing stands out: I have been misunderstood.

I think I've been fortunate enough to have a fairly long career and hopefully I'm at the middle of it now. And I think I'm starting to develop a certain amount of experience and a certain amount of wisdom about kind of what really matters and what doesn't matter.

It took me a long time to get to where I'm at, in my career and as a man. I was going through my trials and tribulations in life, and it gave me the strength to tackle things that have come my way.

What I know at sixty, I knew as well at twenty. Forty years of a long, superfluous, labor of verification.

I have long since abandoned the notion that higher education is essential to either success or happiness. Hothouses of learning do not always grow anything edible.

You do not learn how to write novels in a writing program. You learn how by leading an interesting life. Open yourself up to all experience. Let life pour through you the way light pours through leaves.

Corruption is subtle, just like the Bible said. Many young poets have come to me and asked, How am I gonna make it? They feel, and often with considerable justice, that they are being overlooked while others with less talent are out there making careers for themselves. I always give the same advice. I say, Do it the hard way, and you’ll always feel good about yourself. You write because you have to, and you get this unbelievable satisfaction from doing it well. Try to live on that as long as you’re able.

with poems one accomplishes so little when one writes them early. One should hold off and gather sense and sweetness a whole life long, a long life if possible, and then, right at the end, one could perhaps write ten lines that are good.