Helen Fielding Quotes

One of the things that I love about writing novels is that it really doesn't matter what next step you take as long as you're pursuing some intuition or instinct. Of course, then, intuitions or instincts don't make for great novels, but they often make for good first drafts.

Books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.

A book, at the same time, also has to do with what I call a buzz in the head. It's a certain kind of music that I start hearing. It's the music of the language, but it's also the music of the story. I have to live with that music for a while before I can put any words on the page. I think that's because I have to get my body as much as my mind accustomed to the music of writing that particular book. It really is a mysterious feeling.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

I wrote my second novel, 'A Little Life,' in what I still think of as a fever dream: For 18 months, I was unable to properly concentrate on anything else.

When you're writing a book, you don't really think about it critically. You don't want to know too well what you're doing. First, you write the book, then you find the justification for it.

Well, everything surprises me about the writing process because illustrating comes much more naturally to me than writing does.

I was swimming in my swimming pool when 'The Secret Lovers' popped entire into my head. I got out, dried off, went upstairs, and finished the book in about 50 days.

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.

When I'm writing a novel, I'm dealing with a double life. I live in the present at the same time that I live in the past with my characters. It is this that makes a novelist so eccentric and unpleasant.

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 sat down with a yellow legal pad and began writing 'A Time to Kill.' Had no idea what I was doing. It became, over a period of several years, a secret little hobby nobody knew about except my wife, because she was reading chapter by chapter.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

Good novels are not written, they're rewritten!

Writing is a combination of intangible creative fantasy and appallingly hard work.

A really good day for me is to write my book for about four hours, go to the writing room for about four hours and then maybe come back to the book to finish the day for a few more hours of it.

A novel may take anywhere from two to five years to write and, in the end, you might manage a couple of thousand dollars on it, no more.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song.

I think there's a real connection between acting and writing novels because the way I write characters has a little bit to do with the method acting that I was taught in high school and college.

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.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

Writing is only a guided dream.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

I write very quickly; I rewrite very slowly. It takes me nearly as long to rewrite a book as it does to get the first draft.

One poem or story doesn't matter one way or the other. It's the process of writing and life that matters.