Michael Robotham Quotes

One of my biggest goals, especially with writing YA novels, is just to have people enjoy reading.

I'm not working on the Great American Novel. All I am doing, I hope, is entertaining readers.

It's our job as fiction writers to provide a delight that nothing else can - to such a degree that people have no choice but to read our work. Now that's a very tall order, if not impossible. But why not try?

The last book I read before I wrote my first book - 'Ghosts of Manhattan' - was 'The Gold Coast' by DeMille. I loved it, and it gave me a lot of energy to start into my own.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

Humor is the oxygen of children's literature. There's a lot of competition for children's time, but even kids who hate to read want to read a funny book.

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

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

And I didn't grow up wanting to be a director. I grew up wanting to be a writer, so for me, that was always the goal - to be a novelist, not a screenwriter. And I think, again, if I didn't have the novels, maybe I'd be much more frustrated by not having directed yet.

English fiction was something I loved growing up, and it changed my life - it changed the trajectory of my life.

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

My short stories have always pushed twenty pages. That's no length for a short story to be. You either do them short like Carver or you stop trying.

Novels are the means by which we can escape the moment we are imprisoned in, but at the same time, the roots of a novel are in the world in which it is written. We write, and we read, to understand the world we live in.

If the story is good enough, if it's imaginative enough, if it's moving enough it is going to reach deeper than the level of sheer information and change somebody's life two degrees. That is an enormous achievement.

Books that change you, even later in life, give you a kind of electrical shock as the world takes a different shape.

I wanted nothing less than to be a fiction writer when I was a kid. If you had told me I would be an artist or novelist when I grew up, I would have laughed in your face.

No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.

It takes a lot of energy and a lot of neurosis to write a novel. If you were really sensible, you'd do something else.

But really, it was reading that led me to writing. And in particular, reading the American classics like Twain who taught me at an early age that ordinary lives of ordinary people can be made into high art.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

If I could write the perfect novella I would die happy.

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'm excited and terrified to write something new. I won't be writing about suburbia.

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.