Markus Zusak Quotes

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.

Having reached the halfway mark in the alphabet, my prime focus is on writing each new book as well as I can.

It's one thing you aspire to: someday, you'll be able to write a book.

'Baker Towers' is the book I've always known I would write, but it wasn't an easy book to do.

When I write a book, I'm making it the best book I can.

With this first novel, I am just above the foothills, but I see the path to the top, and it is my desire to write compelling stories about everything that I find of interest.

I never wrote my books especially for children.

I definitely thought I was going to write books. I wrote a couple of children's books when I was like 11 when I was a child myself!

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That’s 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

The vast majority of fiction is written to markets and to this damnable business we have nowadays of categorizing everything.

Anyone can write one book: even politicians do it. Starting a second book reveals an intention to be a professional writer.

Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began.

I like the idea of trying to write a book in every genre.

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.

I wrote six nonfiction books before getting into narrative fiction with 'Robopocalypse,' including 'How to Survive a Robot Uprising.' My goal all along was to start writing fiction, and I guess one day I'd just had enough.

Writers always say, 'I always knew I wanted to be a writer; when I was a three-month-old foetus a pen formed in my hand and I began to scratch my first story on the inside of my mother's womb.' I started later, in my early twenties.

It depends on the book and what else is going on during my life, but it usually takes me about six months to write and revise the first draft.

When people asked me what I was going to do when I grow up, I always said, 'I'm going to be a writer. I'm going to write screenplays. I'm going to write books. I'm going to write plays. That's what I'm going to do.'

I'm first and foremost a writer. I followed my personal legend, my childhood dream of becoming a writer, but I can't say why I'm one.

I had this dream to become a writer since I was a teenager.

When I was about 14 or 15 I decided to become a writer and never for a moment since have I wanted to do anything else.

I pretty much always wanted to be a writer.

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.

I'm just going to write the best books I can.