Tony Buzan Quotes

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I do have fun writing, and a long time ago, I told myself, 'You got to have fun at this, or it'll drive you nuts.'

I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

Every time I finish a book, I say to an imaginary god that I do not believe in, 'Please let me live to write another one.'

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

Finding the discipline, the motivation, the focus, the passion to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen every day and then to make it come alive with characters and with plot is incredibly exciting and at the same time terrifying and frustrating, and sometimes it comes easy and sometimes it comes really hard.

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.

With each book you write you have to learn how to write that book - so every time, you have to start all over again.

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

I don't think many of us launched ourselves into the world of writing books fully formed.

What it takes is to actually write: not to think about it, not to imagine it, not to talk about it, but to actually want to sit down and write. I'm lucky I learned that habit a really long time ago. I credit my mother with that. She was an English teacher, but she was a writer.

When you are writing a book, it feels as if you are simply concentrating on the world of the book and that whatever is happening in your personal life is outside the room, as it were. But maybe that's just the way you have to talk to yourself to make it possible.

I think 'Hollow City' only took a year and a half to write... but it felt like two and a half!

In a way, I started 'Goon Squad' not even realizing I was writing a book. I thought I was just writing a few stories to stall before starting this other book that I wanted to write - or thought I wanted to write: I still haven't written it.

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

For the years I spent working on it, 'Constellation' was the only novel I knew how to write, so maybe I still abided by the maxim? Regardless, I prefer the maxim: Write what you want to know, rather than what you already know.

I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn.

I throw everything I have into whatever story I'm writing - and so there's something immensely gratifying about finishing one piece and then starting fresh with a new setting, time period and cast of characters, getting to see the world through a completely different lens each time.

Most everything that happens to me in any significant sense finds its way into my fiction.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.