A. B. Yehoshua Quotes

Even though I got a late start, first publishing an essay when I was 50 years old, I've since written eight suspense novels.

I didn't really start to write until I was almost 30, and I started with the short stories.

I began writing seriously in my mid-20s and didn't publish my first book until I was 41.

I had always said to myself that forty was the cut off point of my apprenticeship which may for some people sound like a very long one, but the novel as art is a middle-aged art.

I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

I didn't start writing my own books until I was 40.

'The Blade Itself' was my first book. Probably I should've tried a few short stories first, but for some reason I decided to begin with Everest.

They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.

I never wrote anything that was published until I was forty.

There were about ten years of trying, failing, trying again, suffering rejection, etc. My first published book, 'Story of a Girl', was the fourth book I wrote.

I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'

I was one of those kids who never wanted to be anything but a novelist. And I don't know a lot of people who truly live the life that they dreamed of.

I didn't write anything until I was well over 30.

Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'

I decided to write short stories because they got rejected quicker.

I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.

I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.

I think I made my first short fiction sale in 2005. I had been writing unsuccessfully before that.

I was twenty-seven when I began to write seriously, and after two years of rejections, my first book, 'The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo,' was accepted for publication.

I wanted to be a novelist for so long.

When I realized I wanted to do more writing and less traveling around the world teaching live seminars, I decided to write the first 'Chicken Soup for the Soul(R)' book. I knew I wanted to have 100 stories in the book, so I wrote or edited two stories a week for a year.

I wrote my first novel, 'Deadline,' in 1994 as an experiment.

I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.

I always was going to be a writer. The other jobs were just to keep me in food. Though I enjoyed the archaeology.