Amy Waldman Quotes

I hadn't ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six months before I started work on 'Elsewhere' that I would never write a novel.

My son had toyed with the idea of writing and trying to write a little bit, so that kind of gave me the bug to write also.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday.

I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.

I wanted to write it long before I wrote Every Night, Josephine! I'd been thinking about it a long time.

I don't think I knew I would be a writer. I wanted to become a writer, and I tried to write.

I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it's just not what I want to do.

Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began.

Writers always say, 'I always knew I wanted to be a writer; when I was a three-month-old foetus a pen formed in my hand and I began to scratch my first story on the inside of my mother's womb.' I started later, in my early twenties.

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.

I didn't know I was gonna be a writer when I started out.

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

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.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

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

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

I remember all the way back in high school thinking about writing books. And, in fact, I've written a lot of stories. I've got dozens of stories I've written that no one's ever seen.

As an author, I've never forgotten how to daydream.

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.'

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

If you think about becoming a writer, that's just really one of the big dreams I had. It's really important to have those dreams and pursue your passions.