Jess Walter Quotes

The great thing about being a novelist is that you organize your own day.

I'm such a huge fan of fan fiction, to me it's a great way for readers to become writers. It's like putting the training wheels on for writing.

I've had people ask me to come and work for them. I went to Vienna and did three scenes in a movie for a guy that I met at a retrospective of Cassavetes films. It's a great way to travel, to meet people, to see different countries and cultures.

I've heard people, usually writers, say that no one wrote a great book after winning the Booker, but I honestly did not feel any big pressure. 'The Gathering' did hang over me in that it was darker than I thought at the time.

The great thing about Gospel is that you don't have to have an album every year in order to keep working.

I don't just act to pay my rent. I really like doing it, so I get frustrated when I don't get to do it all the time, so short films are a really great way to be doing it and working with your friends, working on smaller, more specific things without limiting yourself in other ways.

I feel very lucky and privileged to be a writer. I feel lucky in the sense that I can branch out into prose and tell different kinds of stories and stuff. But being a writer is so great because you're literally not dependent on anybody.

To be a great painter means to be a great poet: someone who transcends the limits of his language.

That's the great thing about art. Anybody can do it if you just believe. With practice, you can make great paintings.

I would, however, start writing fiction about 10 years before I actually did, because it's such great fun to do, many times more creative than nonfiction.

I had a blast writing the Ranger in 'The Great Dinosaur Rush' for the Moonstone collection. The story turned out to be twice as long as it was supposed to be, but I was having fun. I even showed the Ranger in his 'old prospector' disguise, and I had some nice exchanges between the Ranger and Tonto.

Even though my songs may sound very personal, to me most of them are fiction. It is a great way for me to be able to live a fantasy life as a writer because I get to be someone else, someplace else for three and a half minutes, just like the listener.

From the very beginning, I started doing music performances with a lot of theatrical aspects to them, where humor was a part of it but not necessarily had to be. Humor is just another tool to make the palette more rich and interesting for myself and eventually for the public. It's a great way to break out of convention.

However great a man's natural talent may be, the act of writing cannot be learned all at once.

Chicago is the Great American City, and it was really great to live there during a time of economic expansion and opportunity and growth. I felt like I was living at the center of the world. Unlike New York, no one expects you to be a professional writer.

Poetry taught me a great deal about language and images, but when it came to plotting, I was stumped. It's been very much a learn-by-doing thing for me.

Seeing 'Pretty Little Liars' fans adapt and create their own stories is both exciting and flattering, and I think what Amazon Publishing is offering through Kindle Worlds is a great way to reward their ingenuity.

The really great writers are people like Emily Bronte who sit in a room and write out of their limited experience and unlimited imagination.

I'm not a writer. I know a lot of writers; I know a handful of really excellent, great ones, and I know what they're like. They are in love with language. They're obsessed with it. Even if their thoughts aren't more special than anybody else's, they have a way of putting them into words that makes them sensational.

I must say, it was a lot easier writing novels than I thought it would be. I think it's because I'm a novelist at heart, and it took me a while to figure that out.

For me, writing essays, prose and fiction is a great way to be self-indulgent.

Doing five-minute sets on 'Conan' and things like that are fun and a great way to introduce yourself, but it's such a constricting time, and you usually have to cut bits down.

A novel is a daily labor over a period of years. A novel is a job. But a story can be like a mad, lovely visitor, with whom you spend a rather exciting weekend.

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

Now I don't care what people think. I did some internet campaign where I was the voice of a puppet for Ford Focus ads because they were paying me a lot of money to do it, it was a very easy gig, but then the bonus was, it turned out to be an enormous amount of fun. I've learned not to turn my nose up at things just because they're not what other people might consider cool to do. Because I've also matured enough to know, you never know where these things are going to lead, and you never know what the experience is going to be like.