Stieg Larsson Quotes

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

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.

I might be into writing... I'd like to try it someday. I always come up with some good ideas.

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.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

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

Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.

I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.

I've always been a writer.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

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.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

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.

Listen, I wrote 10 unsuccessful books before I broke through, so I'm looking all the time to keep my books fascinating. I want to write what people want to read, not push any message.

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

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

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.

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.

I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.