Simon Beaufoy Quotes

I was pregnant with my daughter when I started writing my first thriller, so I guess you could blame hormones.

Being out in nature inspires me as a writer.

I write better in Cape Breton... too many people around in Ontario. Down there I meet all sorts of non-human people, but they don't bother me, and I don't feel I have to apologize on behalf of my species quite so often.

The way I like to work is to attach personal experiences to what I'm doing, so it helps tremendously if I can write my own play under what the writer has written.

I mean if I'm in the middle of a field with my keyboard and some headphones and I feel inspired to write something, I'll just write something really beautiful and mellow.

Usually I decide on what it is I'm writing next by the books I'm reading.

When you're a writer, everything that interests you feeds into your work.

I keep a guitar around while writing and will improvise music. I do this for several reasons, such as that it's fun, and sometimes it helps me with the meter.

I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.

It's real easy for me to write a lot of stories. I just go and I live through something, and I go home and write about it. It's that quick.

Music is an important part of my writing process.

I think writers need windows on a view to remind them that a whole world is out there, not the minutiae with which they might be dealing on a close scale.

Going off the road just leaves me more time to be a writer.

I'm of the ilk of writers that feels you have to be open to the inspiration.

Sometimes the writing leads to the revelations, not the other way around.

I feel like part of getting better at writing is knowing where to find that inspiration. Right after something happens to me, the first thing I'll do is go write when those feelings are really, really fresh.

I'm always inspired to write, and it's usually my own life experiences that inspire me.

Because if you're trying to write and you have unlimited time, you can procrastinate an unlimited account, but if you have limited time, you rush to the page trying to get something down in the little bit of fragment of time that you have, and you may write a great deal that way.

I think it took me half a page of 'Wolf Hall' to think: 'This is the novel I should have been writing all along.'

My inspiration for writing is all the wonderful books that I read as a child and that I still read. I think that for those of us who write, when we find a wonderful book written by someone else, we don't really get jealous, we get inspired, and that's kind of the mark of what a good writer is.

Some writers, I'm told, look for their characters' surnames in telephone directories. I don't - it seems too obvious. Or too deliberate: if you go looking for names, you're bound to find them, of course, but I've always had a superstitious hunch that the names you find by accident are always going to be better and more satisfying somehow.

Well, I think everything I've ever read contributes to the background from which I write.

Some writers are curiously unmusical. I don't get it. I don't get them. For me, music is essential. I always have music on when I'm doing well. Writing and music are two different mediums, but musical phrases can give you sentences that you didn't think you ever had.

I believe that it's an author's job to cast his imagination into the far spaces. Your life should - and I think it's inescapable that it will - inform your work. I'm all for using anything that can make your art better, but your intuition should be an equal partner.

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.