Jennifer Weiner Quotes

Lest it sound as if I resent my day job, I have to say that my day job is the reason I write, and it has been the best thing for me as a writer.

No matter how long my day job hours were, I always made time to write. I wrote fiction, short stories, and poetry. I never shared it with anybody.

My advice for writers is to get a good day job. It takes the pressure off writing if you have a job that pays the bills.

I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.

To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.

History releases me from my own experience and jogs my fictional imagination.

I sit down at my desk pretty early in the morning and write all day until about 4 or 5 p.m.

I don't really have special rituals, but I don't try to write fiction unless I have a minimum of a few hours. For me, it takes a while to settle into a mode where I'm truly concentrating.

As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I started seriously applying myself to writing fiction immediately after I finished graduate school. By 'seriously,' I mean that, instead of noodling along on a story, finishing it or not as the mood struck me, I set out to complete what I started, to polish it to the best of my ability, and to send out the finished story.

Everybody knows that I don't have a muse. I'm not interested in that.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

My writing is extremely important, so I write every day. I just enjoy it. I get a kick out of it.

When I start a book, I write a minimum of five pages every day, except weekends. If I'm going on a ski trip, I take my computer with me, get up at six, do my five pages, and then go skiing.

Don't force yourself to write. Some people can write a novel in a few months, whereas for others it can take over a year. I'm lucky to be one of the former - but, even so, if I'm not in the mood to write, I won't. I'll go off, do something else and come back to it when I'm ready.

I don't write every day. I write when I want to write.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn't have a contract.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

I really enjoy doing both, but I didn't write nonfiction until 1994.

Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.

I write in the mornings or afternoons - I'm not a night owl and can write for only four or five hours maximum.

There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.