Jonathan Franzen Quotes

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

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.

I've been writing since I'm five years old. I've been writing books since high school - junior high, high school. I write every single day. I never thought I'd be published.

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 since I was 12 years old.

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.

But, somewhere in there, I did have the thought that this really fits in with my thinking about what I wanted to do; with what has to be done by a writer in order to stay alive as a writer.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

'The Fourth Hand' was a novel that came from twenty years of screenwriting concurrently with whatever novel I'm writing.

If you wish to be a writer, write.

I've been writing stories since I was 12. 'Writer's Digest' was one of my writing teachers, actually.

I write - and then I write some more.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

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've been writing since I was about thirteen but didn't start a book until 2007. I spent four years writing a sci-fi novel before I wrote 'The Bone Season' at nineteen.

Novel writing is solitary work.

My intent was to gain experience for fiction I eventually hoped to write. But there's no question I was drawn in by the hope that journalism would be a creative, thrilling environment.

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

I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.

I am very fortunate in that I have spent pretty much my whole life being a writer, and before I was a writer, I was a storyteller.

I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.

I always wrote. I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written 'Just Kids' had I not spent all of the '80s developing my craft as a writer.

I didn't study writing. I didn't write anything substantial until I got to California.

I used to write at home, but it didn't ever occur to me to be a writer.