Arthur Smith Quotes

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

Novels, in my experience, are slow in coming, and once I've begun them I know I have years rather than months of work ahead of me.

At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.

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

I can write for a long time on one novel and not get tired.

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.

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 stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

Novel writing is solitary work.

A one-hundred-thousand-word novel might take a year or several years, and then you just come to 'The End' one day. But it takes hundreds of days to get to 'The End.' As a writer, you have to put in those hundreds of days.

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

You should be writing for the love of the story, and when it comes time to return to the manuscript, everything else belongs behind a closed door.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

I used to write stories a lot because you had to fill your hours some other way than watching television. So my imagination was vivid, and I used to write a lot of stories. I wrote a novel, which I still have, which is so awful.

I didn't have the great American novel burning inside me, but I felt I could try my hand at popular fiction.

I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.

Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'

Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch.

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

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.

One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

To be a writer, you need to like spending a lot of time by yourself in the company of imaginary people.