Phyllis A. Whitney Quotes

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

I spend about a year between novels.

I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.

In order for a long piece of work to engage a novelist over an extended period of time, it has to deal with questions that you find very important, that you're trying to work out.

I guess there's a sort of cycle with writing books. There's all the researching and then the imagining and writing - which is the real job - and then there's always a period when the book comes out and you have to lift your head and venture out.

I started writing when I was twenty. My first book came out when I was thirty-five. But I never expected that it would happen quickly.

Getting a book published made me feel a little bit sad. I felt driven by the need to write a book, rather than the need to write. I needed to figure out what was important to me as a writer.

The first thing you have to understand is that I was not desperate to be a writer. I was never a closet writer filing away notes in a cupboard.

I still want to give my public, such as it is, a book a year.

Balancing an illustrator and author can be tricky, but I was an illustrator mostly before I wrote my books.

I do have screenplays I've written that never saw the light of day, but I don't usually go back to them. When I've told a story, I want to tell another story.

If, after five years, I hadn't had anything published, I was just going to forget it and go back to TV full-time until I retired or they put me out to pasture.

The most common thing I find is very brilliant, acute, young people who want to become writers but they are not writing. You know, they really badly want to write a book but they are not writing it. The only advice I can give them is to just write it, get to the end of it. And, you know, if it's not good enough, write another one.

I never, ever decided that I had to write a novel because, to me, there's no such decision that ought to be made. It's only something that I felt compelled to do, and it began to evolve.

When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about.

Writing a book is an emotional odyssey, sometimes exhilarating, other times deflating.

I've spent most of my life writing and developing everything that I've wanted to be in - which is why I started writing in the first place.

In a way, I started 'Goon Squad' not even realizing I was writing a book. I thought I was just writing a few stories to stall before starting this other book that I wanted to write - or thought I wanted to write: I still haven't written it.

I think that you just understand, as any creative person, that there's a beast that you have to beat, and it never goes away. I've resigned myself to that, and it's kind of what keeps you going. Writing is the worst and the best.

I remember going over proofs of this book - my first book - back in 2001, in a bar in Toronto called the 'Victory Cafe', and thinking sadly to myself, 'This is a very good manuscript but not a very good book.' I don't know what I meant by that, but I was pretty heartbroken and sure it was true.

I think anyone can do a book if they want to, it's just timing- wise.

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

It usually takes about a year to write each book. I don't plan it that way. I don't set deadlines. If a book wants to take longer, it can.

I am actually hoping to write a series of books! The Amazon was the first one I got finished and have managed to get published! I have plenty more ideas up my sleeve!