Tana French Quotes

I loved writing 'Two Brothers' more than anything else I have written. It's the first book I've written that I've always known I wanted to write. Having said that, it also kept me awake at nights.

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.

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

I really absolutely loved writing my first book.

If you think about writing a book, or when I did, it seems daunting, but when I began writing, it just started flowing.

I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.

Each book, intuitively sensed and, in the case of fiction, intuitively worked out, stands on what has gone before, and grows out of it. I feel that at any stage of my literary career it could have been said that the last book contained all the others.

I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis and Joe have been in my head. They're always there. I started these guys because I like them.

The story grew, got way bigger than the contest rules called for, and next thing I knew I had a book.

Writing takes a lot of patience. It usually takes me a year to write a book. One time, it took me 14 years to write a book, not that I worked on it every day.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

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.

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

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.

After a while, you start to realize that you should write a book you would want to read. I try to write a book I would enjoy.

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

I decided to write a book primarily because people talked me into it.

I think everyone should sit down and write a book. It's a lot like therapy but a lot less expensive.

I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel - that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I'd hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.

I'm still surprised to be an author. I wonder what I'll write next?

Writing is as big a part of my career as acting is, financially and time wise. So, yeah, I love it. That's all I wanted to do since I was young was be a writer. So that and acting are the two most important aspects of my career.

I was very afraid to write a novel - it was a dream for a very long time, and it was one of the few things that I was afraid to try.

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 was swimming in my swimming pool when 'The Secret Lovers' popped entire into my head. I got out, dried off, went upstairs, and finished the book in about 50 days.