Andrea Hirata Quotes

The elegance and the quality - the talent is always in the literature. I start with the word and I base everything on that. It doesn't make any difference to me.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

I don't fiddle or edit or change while I'm going through that first draft.

I don't consciously think of any certain direction when I'm writing. I only try not to be repetitive or redundant.

Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's the real secret of writing. Put yourself in front of the screen or the blank sheet of paper and get to work.

I think what I've recognized over the years is that I'm very, very bingey, extremely bingey when it comes to writing.

Writing is work. It takes a lot of contemplation, concentration, and out-and-out sweat. People tend to romanticize it, that somehow your work appears by benefit of some mystical external force. In reality, to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. It's work, and often it's hard work.

I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer.

I can't write every day. I have to skip a day in between. If I try to do it every day, nothing comes.

In my office I have a sign that says, 'Don't think. Just write!' and that's how I work. I try not to worry about each word, or even each sentence or paragraph. For me, stories evolve. Writing is a process. I rewrite each sentence, each manuscript, many times.

The experienced writer says to the anguished novice: 'Just do it; get something, anything, on to the screen or page, just establish a flow of words, and criticise them later.' You give this advice but can't always take it.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

John Irving once told me he doesn't start a novel until he knows the last sentence. I said, 'My God, Irving, isn't that like working in a factory?'

When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.

You have to have a somewhat cold heart to be a writer.

I work every day until I do not have more to say. I learned from Graham Greene that a very good way is to stop work in the middle of a sentence. Then you know exactly how to continue the day after.

I'm often asked how I write books, but I don't think my approach is suitable for everyone. If I walked into a creative writing class, all I could say to them was 'I tend to make it up as I go along.' I'm not sure that's brilliant advice.

I still write the same way and have the same perspective.

I don't believe in writer's block or waiting for inspiration. If you're a writer, you sit down and write.

My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.

All writers have their own pet commandments.

Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page.

Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.

I don't card out my screenplays ever. I just have an idea I just sit down and write I don't edit.