Elizabeth Kostova Quotes

Writing never comes easy. The difference between Page 2 and Page Nothing is the difference between life and death.

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

I kept trying to write these books that were sort of outside of my realm, and I kept failing.

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

I have been aspiring to write some sort of literature for a long time.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis and Joe have been in my head. They're always there. I started these guys because I like them.

It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

Of course I planned to write the Great American Novel; that lasted about a week, at which point I decided I had nothing to say that could possibly qualify. So I wrote a romance instead.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult if I'm not sure where the story is going.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

Novel writing is solitary work.

I think very visually, and I just never thought I had a novel in me.

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.

There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

Once I have the grain of an idea, it haunts me until I finish the story. I don't like to be haunted, of course, so immediately get to work.