A. E. van Vogt Quotes

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

Any writer will be happy and good only if they know what they're doing and why they're doing it.

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.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.

In terms of people who want to be writers, I wish more people knew how much work it was.

I don't think anyone is ever writing so that you can throw it away. You're always writing it to be something. Later, you decide whether it'll ever see the light of day. But at the moment of its writing, it's always meant to be something. So, to me, there's no practicing; there's only editing and publishing or not publishing.

I've always been a writer.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

I'm not sure if I always wanted to be a writer, but I was always writing.

Raymond Chandler managed to write about L.A. his whole career. Should I keep going writing about New York? Is that what I should be doing? Songwriting doesn't work that way.

As for writing novels - it's what I've done for 30 some-odd years. I can't suddenly say I'm going to take up golf. I need something in my life. As long as I can write a coherent sentence, I'll keep at it.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

I write - and then I write some more.

I got into writing in college... well, in elementary school. But in college, I started writing seriously and had a professor who read my writing and gave me permission to pursue that as a real effort and time-consuming effort.

I kind of live like a writer. I get up and I write. I've done that my whole life.

I'm not one of those true writers who can't bear not to be writing. Yet it's one of the most important things in my life.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

Life being so short, and the possible books to write so many, it's good to function by night as well as by day; but would anybody become a writer if they realised at the outset what the working hours were?

I started writing one afternoon when I was twenty, and ever since then I have written every day. At first I had to force myself. Then it became part of my identity, and I did it without thinking.

I think that like all writers - and if any writer disagrees with this, then he is not a writer - I write primarily for myself.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

I now can be sure that, once I start writing a book, I'll be able to finish it. I've also become more assured about my 'voice' as a writer and being able to keep the characters true to themselves.

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.