Sarah Pinborough 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 started out as a writer of fiction, but nobody wanted to publish my work as a young man. So I decided to put my interest in the narrative writing of biographies.

Every 'Observer' writer wants to be a novelist.

I can't understand why a person will take a year to write a novel when he can easily buy one for a few dollars.

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

I was a freelancer all through my twenties. I did about one story a month and I wanted to write fiction, so the stories that I would do were precursors to 'Sex and the City.'

When I started out in the early 1930s, there were a great many magazines that published short stories. Unfortunately, the short-story market has dwindled to almost nothing.

I think back on that day when 16-year-old me scribbled on some silly piece of paper for some long-forgotten high school career-day project that my dream job was 'romance novelist.'

I was incredibly determined - I wrote short stories, I wrote the beginnings of novels. I wrote a little children's book and sent it to the editor-in-chief of the children's division of Simon and Schuster and she asked me to write a little children's book for a series she was doing.

A whole bunch of agents and editors looked at my stories, and they all said, in effect, 'You're a pretty good writer and you should probably get these published; when you grow up and write a novel, get in touch.'

It's never really easy to be successful as a writer when you're trying to write literary fiction. You've already limited your readership limited by that choice.

I think I would like to write screenplays, books, really anything.

I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.

My favourite authors are Jeffrey Archer, for his story telling skills; John Grisham, for the completely new genre he created; and James Patterson, for the way he created a new business model out of writing.

I would be rejected if I submitted any of my novels as romance novels.

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'

I'm writing another novel and I know what I'm going to do after, which may be something more like this again, maybe some strange mixture of fiction and non-fiction.

I became a copy boy. Not for long. I started writing stories.

In 1982, when I was almost 26 years old, I decided I wanted to write fiction. I'd majored in journalism in college, and I'd always assumed I would write nonfiction.

When I first started writing, I wrote a book called 'Bruiser,' and it was pretty much set in Chicago.

I'm a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.

My first novel, 'Sacrifice,' was set on the Shetland Islands.

I resist when someone calls me a novelist: it implies some kind of inherent superiority of the novel. I'm not a novelist, I'm a writer.