Peter Morgan Quotes

I wrote large chunks of 'The Impostor' and 'The Good Doctor' on a beach in Goa.

There are producers, like the late Geoffrey Perkins, who have truly great ideas that will fire up your synapses and show you that handing in your first draft is not the end of a horrible process, but the beginning of a beautiful one.

I spend about a year between novels.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

I always write on unlined typing paper and write the first draft in longhand, using cheap Bic pens. I try to write about four pages a day, which usually yields a first draft in six months. I don't plot ahead of time, so I'm flying by the seat of my pants for the first draft.

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

A novel is often a longer process in handling self-doubt.

Writing is part intuition and part trial and error, but mostly it's very hard work.

To tell you the truth, I don't edit much at all. Most times, when I have finished the first draft, that's the book. Of course, I work on the page I am on until I am happy with it. I might even say that I try to state the landscape.

I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts.

I am never really surprised at the way my books take shape. They are just not as perfect as I'd like them to be.

Sometimes some of these little side excursions are useful and I manage to fit them in the book somewhere.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

The whole excitement for writing anything is quite intense. And for a day or two, you think you've done everything extremely well. The problems start on the third day, and continues for the rest of your life.

Most people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o'clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that's enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

Every published writer suffers through that first draft because most of the time, that's a disappointment.

I don't think anybody submits their first story and sells right away.

I find getting the first draft down to be the biggest challenge. Every word, every punctuation mark, every plot point is a decision. It's much more fun to play with something that already exists.

A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste but you don't want to see how it was made.

It depends on the book and what else is going on during my life, but it usually takes me about six months to write and revise the first draft.

'One With You' was the hardest book I have ever written. I rewrote it three times.

Writing novels is sitting in a room by yourself for a year.