David Bergen Quotes

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

I have never started a novel - I mean except the first, when I was starting a novel just to start a novel - I've never written one without rereading Victory. It opens up the possibilities of a novel. It makes it seem worth doing.

I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

Sometimes reading other writers helps. You learn some little technique that turns out to be useful, or simply are reinspired by the amazing things others do.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I've always been an entertainer all my life; I come from a family of entertainers. I always made, very pretentiously, a comparison with Agatha Christie. Her inspiration was crime, and I'm sure she must have taken courses or read about crime, because it was the basis of her stories. But ultimately, it was her own fantasy.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

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

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

When I read good stories, I want to write good stories too.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

A lot of my ideas for books come from newspaper articles. But I don't like to be actively looking for ideas.

I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.

To become a novelist, the most crucial thing one must do is read, read and read again - gradually you begin to think like a writer. Ideas are not found - they are shaped.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

It usually helps me write by reading - somehow the reading gear in your head turns the writing gear.

Writing a novel isn't like building a brick wall. You don't figure out how to do it, and then it gets easier each time because you know what you're doing. With writing a novel, you have to figure it out each time. Each time you start over, you just have the language and the idea and the hope.

In my experience, a novel is the culmination of various thoughts and impressions collected over time, until something comes along to give them a shape, to turn them into a story.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.

I discovered that writing was very nice indeed when I was very young, and I never changed. I don't think my style has changed very much at all - though I hope what I say is a bit more interesting. It's about getting to know a character and loving them, I think.