Bob Mayer Quotes

I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

In a way, I started 'Goon Squad' not even realizing I was writing a book. I thought I was just writing a few stories to stall before starting this other book that I wanted to write - or thought I wanted to write: I still haven't written it.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

Writing takes a lot of patience. It usually takes me a year to write a book. One time, it took me 14 years to write a book, not that I worked on it every day.

Many first-time novelists end up rewriting their first two or three chapters, trying to get them 'just right.' But the point of the first draft is not to get it right; it's to get it written - so that you'll have something to work with.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.

I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel - that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I'd hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.

I write down portions, maybe fragments, and perhaps an imperfect view of what I'm hoping to write. Out of that, I keep trying to find exactly what I want.

I was very afraid to write a novel - it was a dream for a very long time, and it was one of the few things that I was afraid to try.

Finding the discipline, the motivation, the focus, the passion to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen every day and then to make it come alive with characters and with plot is incredibly exciting and at the same time terrifying and frustrating, and sometimes it comes easy and sometimes it comes really hard.

I write early in the morning. I just wake up whenever I feel awake and I have to be sitting and writing pretty soon after that. If I take too long to think about the impossibility of what I'm trying to, I'll be defeated by it.

I wish I could write easily. I'm one of those guys who's visited by the muse when things are dire.

I'm not a good writer. It takes me a long time to get there. I write and then rewrite and revise and do it over and over until I'm satisfied.

Sometimes in writing you have difficult periods and then other times it just flows.

When I was working on 'Freddie,' I had been trying to write it on a computer for many, many years, but that delete button just won't let anything go forward.

The most difficult and complicated part of the writing process is the beginning.

I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.

I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.

I always wanted to direct and write a movie, but I thought that I didn't really have it in me. I tried to write fiction and humorous short stories, and some were considered successful, but it was always a huge effort for a small reward. I was always intimidated by the process.

I would like to one day write a nice big novel and enjoy writing it and people enjoy reading it but I cannae be bothered or I don't have any ideas that would fill up a big book like that.

If you try to write a novel in L.A., you're a chump; everyone is speeding by, and you're driving a rickshaw.