Cao Yu Quotes

And I have finally realized that, you know, it's not a given that my lifespan will accommodate my writing aspirations. It could be that it would take me 12 more books at six years each to get it - which means I would have to live to be 126. Which I fully intend to do, of course.

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.

Like so many writers I started writing stories because I didn't have much time for anything else.

I think 'Hollow City' only took a year and a half to write... but it felt like two and a half!

My goal is to write one book of fiction, and that's all I want to do. It takes so much time, and I don't really have enough time. But I admire writers so much.

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.

Writing has been so much a part of my life that I'm really quite annoyed that I can't do as much as I used to.

I'm a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.

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

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

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.

For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.

Just being able to get paid to do something you love is a wonderful thing. That said, a writer's daily routine, unless you're Dominick Dunne, isn't exactly glamorous. Much of it amounts to drudgery, staring at a computer screen all day in a room by yourself, juggling nouns and verbs to make a demanding editor happy.

Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'

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.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

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.

The great thing about being a writer is that you have a long, perhaps frighteningly long time in which to do your work.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

It is hard work to give life to new characters every single day. It is not as if I am God. I am just a tired, middle-aged woman trying to keep going.

Going off the road just leaves me more time to be a writer.

I write everywhere. I've written books while I was on planes, at Disney World, and in multiple countries of which I am not a native. It can be a struggle to make word count sometimes, but I will persevere!

Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page.

One of the best parts of being a writer means that researching all kinds of cool stuff actually counts as work!