Evelyn Waugh Quotes

Nobody asks you to do this. The world out there is not panting after another novelist. We choose it

Writing a book is the most terrifying thing that I've ever done. It's so much harder than writing for television because it is a completely different skill set.

Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

When I wrote my novel, 'The Ministry of Special Cases,' I couldn't even brush my teeth. I had to write in isolation from everything else. I thought a play would take away from my fiction, but the more projects I work on, the more time I have.

I really need so much time to really make headway on a novel that requires me to disappear from the world in a way.

You have to protect your writing time. You have to protect it to the death.

That 'writers write' is meant to be self-evident. People like to say it. I find it is hardly ever true. Writers drink. Writers rant. Writers phone. Writers sleep. I have met very few writers who write at all.

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.

The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.

Books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.

Time, which is your enemy in almost everything in this life, is your friend in writing.

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.

Pay attention to your passions. They are the key to starting and finishing the book you are meant to write. I don't believe in talent. I believe in passion.

Money to a writer is time to write.

There is always something of the writer in the work but I don't think Melville had to be swallowed by a whale to write a great novel. If I had lived the lives of all the characters of the songs I've written, that would truly be an extraordinary story.

[On writing:] What a difficult kind of work to choose! But of course one did not choose it. There was no choice.

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.

When you write, you want to get rid of the world, don’t you? Of course you do. When you’re writing, you’re creating your own worlds.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

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

You can't be a writer if you don't write, it's just that simple.

Writers do not write what they know. They write what they can imagine.

Choose your tools carefully, but not so carefully that you get uptight or spend more time at the stationery store than at your writing table.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.