Monica Ali Quotes

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'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

I don't want to compare myself to somebody like Fitzgerald or Hemingway, but I feel like, for some writers, going to a certain city, a certain place, is what kickstarts your imaginative process.

My son had toyed with the idea of writing and trying to write a little bit, so that kind of gave me the bug to write also.

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

I always have a book that I use that somehow inspires my novels.

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

Inspiration comes from so many sources. Music, other fiction, the non-fiction I read, TV shows, films, news reports, people I know, stories I hear, misheard words or lyrics, dreams... Motivation? The memory of the rush I get from a really good writing session - even on a bad day, I know I'll find that again if I keep going.

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.

If I'm hanging around too much, my wife and kids say, 'Hey, why don't you go downstairs and start a new novel?'

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

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.

People often ask writers where they get their inspiration, and for me, the short answer is that I haven't a clue; I'm just grateful that I get them.

So, I guess motherhood and the threat of not being able to pay my rent inspired me to be a novelist. But as far as what inspired me to be a writer, it's the stories. It sounds very cliched, but the stories rise up and demand to be told. They always have done, long before I became a writer.

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking, 'I really want to write a novel.'

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

When I'm writing a novel, I'm usually just trying to write about things that are interesting to me.

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'd never have written the big books in London.

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

So much of my own life inspires what I write. Whether it's work, family, friends, motherhood, I am a writer who tends to write what she knows. In 'Revenge Wears Prada,' a great deal of my own life finds its way into the book.