Aleksandar Hemon Quotes

I always wanted to be a writer... 'Critical Care' was my first published work. I was 34 when it came out. I was accumulating 'Critical Care' for years. I would go for a whole year and not touch it. And then I'd go back to it.

I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to 'The New Yorker.'

Once I decided to write, to be published, I knew it would happen.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

I started writing when I was 11. In my late teens, I was writing short stories of every conceivable type and sent them to everything from 'Future Science Fiction' to 'The Sewanee Review.'

I never thought I would grow up writing a book.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

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

I was definitely meant to be a young adult author, and I love it - I'm here to stay!

I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that.

I loved English, and I did very well in it. A lot of teachers encouraged me to write, and because of that, it later made me think it was possible to be a writer.

I don't want to be famous per se, but I want to write books for as long as I can. And I plan on writing a lot.

I was very fortunate that my first novel captivated the imaginations of so many readers who asked for a sequel. After that, one book led to another as I discovered other facets to my characters I wanted to investigate further.

When I was eight years old, I wrote a paragraph-long short story about a goat on my mother's hundred-pound, black-and-white-screen laptop. The story came about largely because I liked the way the word 'goat' looked on the page, but I decided then and there that I wanted to be a writer. That desire never changed.

Collections aren't really planned. I just keep writing short pieces until I have enough for a collection.

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

I want to be an author.

When I look back at my career as an author, I don't look at the first book that was ever published as to where my career began - I look to the first book that I ever wrote.

I will try to write books until I drop dead.

Not until my middle thirties did I consider myself a novelist.

I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.

Writing is the hardest thing I know, but it was the only thing I wanted to do. I wrote for 20 years and published nothing before my first book.

No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.

Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, 'Crank,' with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.

I am a writer and always was; being a writer is an integral part of my identity. Being published, being well regarded, is a component of that identity.