Ralph Ellison Quotes

I didn't really choose to write; I more or less fell into it.

I'm an accidental writer.

So to answer your question, I'm not entirely sure how I ended up where I am today, in the sense that nobody in my family is an actor. It just happened by mistake.

I didn't intend to be a novelist. I didn't intend to be anything. I thought I'd be a journalist.

I didn't know I was gonna be a writer when I started out.

I might spend 100 pages trying to get to know the world I'm writing about: its contours, who are my main characters, what are their relationships to each other, and just trying to get a sense of what and who this book is about. Usually around that point of 100 pages, I start to feel like I'm lost, I have too much material, it's time to start making some choices. It's typically at that point that I sit down and try to make a formal outline and winnow out what's not working and what I'm most interested in, where the story seems to be going.

Writing is a sufficiently lonely and mysterious pastime that I don't begrudge myself a talisman or two, so long as they don't become ways of distracting myself from the glum inescapability of actual work.

I was writing my first book when I was in college. I was a teenager.

I'm not afraid of just cranking it out and seeing what comes out of my subconscious. Because I don't always know what I'm feeling. I do a lot of rewriting later. But that first blast feels like a spigot - like it's coming from somewhere else.

I got into writing short stories and blogs while on the road.

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write stories in my mid-thirties. My kids were still little, and they were in school and day care, and I had begun to think a lot about wanting to tell some stories and not being able to do it in poetry.

I had a series of terrible jobs, whatever would allow me to write for four hours during the day. During that time I wrote three novels - all of which were extraordinarily poor. I decided after that to go and get my MFA.

I don't know what I'm going to write when I begin to write. It feels like you are walking down a path, but you can't see around the bend and you don't know where you are going to go, which is fun.

I started to read my first book at about the age of six. I started to write a book simultaneously. Not to compete, just to augment. And that's how one starts. Or I started.

I never told anybody I wanted to write, I kind of fell into it backwards.

My advice to would-be young authors is to read a lot, write a lot, and not worry about creating a finished product. Keeping a journal is not a bad idea either.

I was going to write a book one day and I actually did. To have it is a major accomplishment for me.

The older I get and the more fiction I write, the more I outline, the more I think about plot before I dive in and plunge too far.

We never write anything with themes. We just write the same rubbish all the time.

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

Writing may or may not be your salvation; it might or might not be your destiny. But that does not matter. What matters right now are the words, one after another. Find the next word. Write it down.

I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.

have a much harder time writing stories than novels. I need the expansiveness of a novel and the propulsive energy it provides. When I think about scene - and when I teach scene writing - I'm thinking about questions. What questions are raised by a scene? What questions are answered? What questions persist from scene to scene to scene?

If there's any single talent a writer needs, it's persistence. If you can keep at your writing and you can learn as you write, you can tell any story you want to tell.

I always worry that knowing too much about a novel or a story early on in writing will close it down - it feels fatalistic in some way.