Adam Ross Quotes

Writing is really hard, and it's really a skill.

I'm a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don't agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.

If you are a good writer - and I think I am - you are able to handle any kind of group and imagine their lives.

I never thought I was very good at developing material. I grew up at the BBC where they sent you scripts.

The good parts of a book may be only something a writer is lucky enough to overhear or it may be the wreck of his whole damn life and one is as good as the other.

There are probably writers who are much more visual than I am and some who are less. I like to think of myself as a happy medium.

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

The process of composition, messing around with paragraphs and trying to make really good prose, is hardwired into my personality.

I work at the sentences. Many of the things people find distinctive about my writing, I think of as natural.

There isn't any distinction between a reader and a writer - reading is so much a part of it.

The writer can choose what he writes about but he cannot choose what he is able to make live.

One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm not any good at it.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

And I think a good writer's gonna make it interesting. From the first paragraph it will all be interesting. Just work at it and work at it and work at it.

I don't really think in terms of making something that is going to be bought everywhere, because I don't read those things. My writing is a process in which I try my best to make good sentences and a sequence of events that is compelling and believable.

I had to write about realistic circumstances. That's the way my brain works. And I think that gave me a sort of place in the field.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.

When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.

In the most self-protective of ways, I don't think about the reader when I'm writing - I just think about the story.

My whole life I've tried to find the thing I can do that other people can't do, and invest in that, and the one thing I can do is write narratives and build characters. I can do that.

I wouldn't like to be a character in one of my books!

I think writing well takes a little bit of talent and an awful lot of work.

I think that, for physicians who want to become writers, they have the material, the smarts, they have the logic, they know the stories; it's just a matter of being able to connect with their emotional sides - that's the key to writing good fiction.