Peter Straub Quotes

When I finish a first draft, I often look back at first chapters I wrote and laugh at them. They're like pictures of yourself in middle school. You're embarrassed to see them.

All of a sudden, when you're exposed to a large audience, they think you just started writing that day, but I started years before. I look back at things I wrote then and I'm so embarrassed - the writing seems so blocky and choppy to me and I wouldn't have wanted success any sooner because the writing was even worse.

I wish I could do a lot of things different. I'm not going to tell you what they are, but if I had a list of all my films right now, I'd go, 'Okay, I'll cross that one out and cross that one out and cross that one out and cross that one out.' Really. But I've made over 40 films. How can I not have some losers in there?

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

If to live is to progress, if you are lucky, from foolishness to wisdom, then to write novels is to broadcast the various stages of your foolishness.

I'm still surprised to be an author. I wonder what I'll write next?

As I look over my work, I mean every time I look over my early work, I see, yes, I could do that then and then I could do that and that... That may be the hardest thing for a writer, at least for a poet, to tell what the identity of his work is.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

Usually a feeling of disappointment follows the book, because what I hoped to write is not what I actually accomplished. However, it becomes a motivation to write the next book.

Whenever I write a novel, I have a strong sense that I am doing something I was unable to do before. With each new work, I move up a step and discover something new inside me.

Yeah, it's odd when you look back at your own work. Some filmmakers don't look back at their work at all. I look at my work a lot, actually. I feel like I learned something while looking at stuff I've done in terms of what I'm going to do in the future, mistakes I've made and things at work or what have you.

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

It's really important to me to keep growing as a writer, to look for new challenges and be harshly critical of my own work in order to learn and tell better stories.

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

But I've been at writing long enough now to know that every three or four books I have to start a new direction.

You ask me why I air your dirty laundry, but you do not ask yourself why you soil it to begin with.

If you have a bad experience on the air, you don't think you've done your job, or you have an embarrassing moment. I guarantee you'll work harder the next time not to let it happen again.

With 'Interpreter,' I didn't know it was ever going to be a book, that they were going to be published. I was writing them in a vacuum for the most part. They were my apprentice work. Then the stories happened to become a book.

My first novel - the novel I wrote before 'Midnight's Children' - feels, to me, now, very - I mean, I get embarrassed when I see people reading it. You know, there are some people who, bizarrely, like it. Which I'm, you know, I'm happy for.

I see myself as a first-draft writer, so when I sit down to write something, the first draft is usually pretty close to the end draft.

I do always look back and feel faintly embarrassed by anything I've done in the past. I think that's not a terrible thing, because if you don't do that, how are you growing and moving forward?

When you do something that maybe wasn't the best thing to do at the time, you don't want to hold onto those feelings of guilt, shame or embarrassment, as much as you'd like to learn from them.

I always find out after the fact that the books I've been writing were actually some sort of therapy, some sort of, you know, self-examination that I had to write the book in order to complete.

My early novels were written in quite a dark place. I stand by them, but I would never write them again. I think it is subversive to embrace emotional optimism, because it goes against the grain.

Embarrassment is where growth happens.