Laura van den Berg Quotes

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

Writing novels is sitting in a room by yourself for a year.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

For me, novels coalesce into being, rather than arrive fully formed.

When I write, I tend to be quite cut off from the world. At that point of time, I'm not thinking about editors, publishers or readers. I write the story the way it comes to me.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

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 knew as far back as 2001 that I would write a book called 'A Visit From the Goon Squad,' though I had no idea what kind of book it would be.

I spend so long writing each of my novels that by the time I'm done with one, I'm ready to discover a totally different world.

I don't know exactly where the ideas come from. One day, a sentence just popped into my head - 'There was going to be trouble, and, hell, he just wasn't in the mood for it' - and I knew I had a novel.

I'm always working on my next novel, even when I'm not.

I spend about a year between novels.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world for a time.

I like that original romance of having a pen and a legal pad and going anywhere in the world and being able to write a novel with just those two things.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

As a novelist, you could say that I am dreaming while I am awake, and every day I can continue with yesterday's dream. Because it is a dream, there are so many contradictions and I have to adjust them to make the story work. But, in principle, the original dream does not change.