Candace Bushnell Quotes

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel.

I've written 16 children's books and five unpublished novels. Some of the latter were breathtakingly bad.

I sat down to try to write 'Edinburgh,' an autobiographical novel, and that took five years to write and two years to sell.

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

You don't sit up in a cave and write the Great American Novel and know it is utterly superb, and then throw it page by page into the fire. You just don't do that. You send it out. You have to send it out.

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.

I was very fortunate that my first novel captivated the imaginations of so many readers who asked for a sequel. After that, one book led to another as I discovered other facets to my characters I wanted to investigate further.

I wrote for 10 years before I even started the 'Percy Jackson' series.

I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91.

I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

Once I finished 'Eileen,' I wanted to write more novels. I don't see myself stopping any time soon.

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

When I complete a novel I set it aside, and begin work on short stories, and eventually another long work. When I complete that novel I return to the earlier novel and rewrite much of it. In the meantime the second novel lies in a desk drawer.

I began writing early - very, very early... I was already writing short stories for the radio and selling poems to poetry and art festivals; I was involved in school plays; I wrote essays, so there was no definite moment when I said, 'Now I'm a writer.' I've always been a writer.

I thought I would write non-fiction. I thought I would enter the New York literary scene as copy editor, work my way up, and then write my own books.

If someone had told me in high school that one day I'd write an historical novel, I would have rolled my eyes.

Once I started writing novels, I understood how hard it was to write really good short stories.

You come out of your MFA program with a cogent clutch of stories, trying to get an agent interested, and she or he admits these are quality, sure, but this agent actually needs something the publisher can make money on. So you get kind of bullied by the market into writing a novel.

I wanted to find something I could do at home. I sat down with a friend and made a list of all the things I could try, and one of them was writing a novel.

I wanted to be a literary writer, so I wrote story after story and sent them to 'The New Yorker.'

I left my job as a feature writer on a newspaper to write a book, then sent it off to a number of agents thinking they would all reject me. Within a week, most had come back to say they loved what they had read, which then led to a bidding war for my first two novels.

When I was in college, I used to write little ditties and short stories and poetry for my friends. Writing a book is another thing. It is so much different from my traditional day of dirty fingernails and greasy hair and hot pans.

After I'd been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.