Sarah Waters Quotes

The idea of being a novelist is really romantic, but it's kind of the same as being president of the United States - it's not gonna happen.

I don't know if I want to be a writer.

I knew from the age of 16 that I wanted to be a writer because I just didn't think I could do anything else. So I read and read and wrote short stories and dreamed of escape.

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

They think I'm going to be a schoolteacher but I'm going to be a poet.

I never dreamt I could be an author when I grew up. It just didn't occur to me, because I thought you had to be a) academic, so go to university, things like that, and I didn't think I was clever, or b) dead because I just assumed all the authors in the library were dead.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

I'm never going to write a book like Anthony Sher did, you know, 'The Broadcaster Prepares.' I'm only talking to myself. I'd have liked to be a writer, or a journalist, but if things don't come easy to me I don't do them. I think if you're always thinking how difficult something is, you shouldn't be doing it.

Didn't you know I'm going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don't feel badly, I didn't either!

I wasn't taking myself seriously as a novelist, and then it became my day job.

I was not especially a writer back in college.

Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!

What I'd like to be above all is a writer.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

I wasn't raised in a family that cared about how you look. The fact that I have made my living in acting, where that matters, that really feels antithetical to me as a person.

I know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.

I think there's this assumption that everybody would rather be a director, and I don't know that that's the case for me, so we'll see.

You have to choose whether to take the money or follow your own ambitions, playing in the best league in the world and winning titles.

My dad used to call me 'the dreamer.' He was right.

When I was really young, my ambition wasn't to do science. I didn't really know that I could. It was to write a great novel.

I love writing. I really look up to Lena Dunham, who writes and directs her show. That's something I might want to do when I'm older.

I wanted to be a writer and I ended up being a writer.

At one point, I had a story accepted at the 'New Yorker,' which sent off weird bells in people when I told them - 'Oh,' they thought, 'now you are a writer' - where I really had been for the last 30-odd years.

There is no doubt that Michael Symmons Roberts is a very good poet - you don't win a Whitbread award and get shortlisted for a TS Eliot prize for nothing. Few poets, though, have ever been good novelists, and vice-versa.

I'm not really a numbers guy, but I always have a goal in mind.