Daniel Woodrell Quotes

I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books, I have to start a new direction.

I'm not embarrassed about the novels I wrote when I was younger, but I couldn't write them today because of my religion.

I started off doing fiction in 1993. It didn't occur to me to do nonfiction because it wasn't a thing yet. So I was bumbling around, writing short stories, and then I took a nonfiction workshop, and I realized that this was what I was supposed to do.

I don't write as much erotic romance as I used to, but I think that's just because my writing style has changed.

Looking back, I imagine I was always writing. Twaddle it was too. But better far write twaddle or anything, anything, than nothing at all.

I wrote 'Ava Wrestles the Alligator' when I was 22 or 23. These people and that world have been evolving in me for a while. It's such a shift not to be in that world.

I was writing notes, but not composing poems. The Hunter began to develop out of this fragmented process.

I started off like everyone else does, slogging but having a compulsion to put words on paper. I didn't write or read horror or fantasy, other than children's fantasy, until I was in my teens.

Anything you write, even if you have to start over, is valuable. I let the story write itself through the characters.

One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

I used to think that when I finished a book, I was finished with it. But it's like a wonderful Hydra. Every time a head disappears, more heads appear, so I will be writing for the rest of my life. The more books I write, the more books I find that I still have to write about. I use it like an inspiration, and that's wonderful.

I like to think I've grown as a writer and taken some risks, but I still consider myself to be a literary writer.

I believe that every writer evolves with every successive novel. I view myself as work-in-progress.

I tried to reject everything I knew as a TV writer when I decided to be a novelist, and the books didn't work. Finally I realized I should go back to all the techniques I'd learned.

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.

Every time I write a new book, I want to push myself to try something different.

You should constantly write because your writing is always evolving and progressing. It's really important to start writing young.

I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.

I'm not reading what I write when I wrote. It's an unconscious outpouring that's a mess, and it's many, many steps away from anything anyone would want to read. Creating that way seems to generate the most interesting material for me to work with, though.

When you've written long enough, you see that there's a common theme in your work.

In my experience, every book you write changes the conditions in which you write the next.

In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.