Clive Cussler Quotes

It's just the garbage in/garbage out trick. If you're not taking any fiction in, good or bad, then how can you be spitting any back out (good or bad)? I can't even imagine trying to write without reading. Really, I can hardly write a novel at all if I'm not reading just book after book.

There's one novel, Cujo, that I barely remember writing at all.

I guess what led to me writing 'Holes' was having moved to Texas in 1991, and it was sort of my reaction to Texas.

Honestly, I get character ideas from the most inane places. Sometimes a song will give me an idea. Sometimes I will just hear a snippet of conversation that ends up having nothing to do with the book that emerges.

Ideas come from all over, but as I write more and more, I find I'm always hunting for mood: I want to write a novel with a pervasive mood that sticks with you after you close the cover.

I always have a book that I use that somehow inspires my novels.

While writing, I tend to repeat the same song, endlessly, for thousands of times. This helps me ignore any lyrics, and helps create a consistent mood for each book.

I wrote a great deal of a novel, 'Winter's Tale,' on the roof of a Brooklyn Heights tenement on Henry Street. I was a technical climber, and now and then I would put down my manuscript and get up to walk along parapets and climb walls and chimneys.

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 taught elementary school and painted apartments for ten years. Now I write full-time and never have to change a thing I write. Every book comes to me in a flash of inspiration and takes me about two seconds to finish. The longer books, like the 'Time Warp Trio' novels, take a little longer to write - more like four seconds.

When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

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.

Every so often, I'll get an idea from a dream, but most of the time, ideas come to me while I'm toiling away at the keyboard just like every other writer.

Before I write a novel, images float around in my head that work like icons - they are meaningless in themselves, but serve as reminders.

When I'm working on a novel, I generally do write every day, but in between those marathons, I take breaks. My brain needs time to recharge.

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

My writing is inspired by just about everything, yet I am unaware of so much of the process.

I do as much bookish research as I can but when I sit down to write, often I think, 'Wait, I was there.' That is one of the great advantages of having wandered around the world and lived in so many places and met such fascinating people.

I knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

I'm always a great student of writers' work habits. Balzac sat at his desk dressed in a monk's robe, and he always had to have a rotten apple on his desk. The smell of the apple inspired him somehow.

Without fail, the first question I am asked at any author event is, 'Are your books based on your real life?'

I'm never really conscious of what I'm being influenced by when I'm writing.

The ideas for my books come about in two ways. There can be an intellectual idea that seems to be the reason for writing the book. [...] The other motive is unconscious. There is something deeply psychological and emotional that draws me to the material in the first place.

I certainly immerse myself in as many crazy Hollywood events as I can because you never know where you can pick up material.