Laura van den Berg Quotes

There is no trick to it. If you like to write and want to write, you write, no matter where you are or what else you are doing or whether anyone pays any heed.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

Writing is my love. If you love something, you find a lot of time. I write for two hours a day, usually starting at midnight; at times, I start at 11.

I can't envisage stopping writing.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

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

I'm basically always writing. Why wouldn't I? I love it.

I've always kept writing. There's never been a moment where I went through a spell where I just don't write.

I'm always working on my next novel, even when I'm not.

A writer has to write something that they're - sit down with or are interested in every day of their life.

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.

I guess I write four or five hours a day, but I do it seven days a week. It's very disciplined, yes, but it's joy for me.

Still, something about writing made me spend large hours of my free time at my desk.

But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.

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.

It's a job. When I'm writing I'm going to do it five to six days a week and I'm going to work for four to six hours a day. There's no magic writing fairy. It's just hard work.

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.

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

If you don't put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There's the writer and there's the author. The author - you don't ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care - easier said than done.

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.

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.

If you show up to work five days in a row, nobody's going to pat you on the back - everyone does that. Well, do that with your writing. Just show up. Be there for it. When you get an idea, write it down somewhere and then be a steward of that idea.

And I love writing; I've been writing ever since I was seven.

A one-hundred-thousand-word novel might take a year or several years, and then you just come to 'The End' one day. But it takes hundreds of days to get to 'The End.' As a writer, you have to put in those hundreds of days.