Lee Child Quotes

I never know what I'm going to write next, and when I think I do I usually turn out to be mistaken.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

I've never been one of those guys who storyboards every frame, because that would take away some of the mystery and some of the fun.

When I write, I don't know what is going to emerge. I begin in a condition of complete unknowing, an utter nakedness of concept or goal. A word appears, another word appears, an image. It is a moving into mystery.

I'm never quite sure how the poem is going to resolve itself and that I'm always in some way surprised. I make a discovery in a poem as I write it.

All stories come from the subconscious - which is why it doesn't make sense to over-plan.

But this is neither here nor there why do I mention it? Ask my pen, it governs me, I govern not it.

I start with a character and a situation, but I don't know what's going to happen until I write it. Sometimes things happen that surprise me.

I think the most rewarding part for me is kind of not knowing where the story's going next, and then finding out and being blown away by it.

It was a roller-coaster process. For a long time I had no idea what I was doing. I wasn't writing with an outline. And, rare for me, I wrote scenes out of sequence. . . . I didn't understand the play when I wrote it. It was something I'd give in to. It happens to me periodically. I give over and write whatever comes to me and I don't know what it means and then I do. It's thrilling.

I sort of have various sort of theories when people ask me about songwriting because it is a mystery. You don't really know. Sometimes you can do it and sometimes you can't. It's really peculiar.

I've always been somebody who, when I started a picture, never knew what the next picture would be.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

I like to write in a shroud of secrecy because I have to keep finding ways to scare myself.

Writing is such a strange, utterly mysterious process. First, there was nothing; then, suddenly, there was something. I don't know where thoughts are born. Where the hell does it come from? I don't know. I really don't know.

A poet is someone who stands outside in the rain hoping to be struck by lightning.

I don't outline; I listen to a kind of whisper inside the material.

What I do is write, and I try to write as closely as I can into what I call 'the mystery.'

I write sentence to sentence. That's the kind of writer I am. I don't have a plot when I begin. I have to be convinced and I have to be surprised.

There are no rules and regulations for perfect composition. If there were we would be able to put all the information into a computer and would come out with a masterpiece. We know that's impossible. You have to compose by the seat of your pants.

The other thing in composition is opening up the unconscious.

I think a part of the reason that those early plays were short was that I just kept having these ideas, and I'd just go off and write them. I wasn't trying to write one-act plays - it's just how the ideas would be expressed. Every condition I was in seemed like it could be a play.

It is the mystery of the creative act that something other than our conscious self takes over.

I don't know - it's a bit of a mystery of how things come about when they do. I don't have a scientific explanation for it. Sometimes when you're writing a song, you don't know where you're going.

The poet doesn't invent. He listens.