Cynthia Voigt Quotes

I had no idea I'd end up writing four books when I completed 'Mortal Engines.' I didn't even think it would find a publisher.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

As soon as I finished the first book, I wrote a second, which I hope to sell this year, and I have just about finished the third book in the series. Two more are already outlined. I'm in this for the long haul.

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

I have written a bunch of scripts that have not gotten produced, much more so early in my career than later.

I am proudest of that first novel, 'Trust,' of anything I have written. I don't think I've had such intense energy since.

The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

They say you hit your stride as a writer at about 50. I'm hoping to do that.

I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

I've been writing since I'm five years old. I've been writing books since high school - junior high, high school. I write every single day. I never thought I'd be published.

It was relatively easy to write 'The Cave of Lost Souls', though, because it came to me one night in a dream. I remember waking up and having this idea for a complete story - from start to finish - in my head, so I jotted it down, then later began writing the thing.

I have learned many things in the 30 years that I have been writing.

To write it, it took three months; to conceive it three minutes; to collect the data in it all my life.

'Presumed Innocent' was written over a six to seven year period with intervals in between where I was figuring out the end of the book and writing other stuff... My life as a writer was carried on against the odds. I had written four unpublished novels by then... as a writer of fiction, I hadn't gotten very far. I just wanted to do it.

I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.

I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

I must say, it was a lot easier writing novels than I thought it would be. I think it's because I'm a novelist at heart, and it took me a while to figure that out.

I think I made my first short fiction sale in 2005. I had been writing unsuccessfully before that.

When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.

I've sold scripts in the past, and also a TV pilot that didn't get made, to Fox. But yeah, I've been writing for a while.

I want to have compassion for my characters - I feel like I am the characters when I'm writing them.

At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.