Paula Hawkins Quotes

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

When you write a novel, you never have to be in the service of the reader. My only concern with my books is that the world that's created be as logical and whole as possible.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

My first attempt at writing a novel was horrible. I had to throw it away. But I stuck with the idea, which is what became 'The Invisible Circus.'

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

For me, writing a short story is much, much harder than writing a novel.

I think of novels as houses. You live in them over the course of a long period, both as a reader and as a writer.

It is so much hard work writing your first novel. You're not even sure that it is possible to do.

A novel is a big thing. It's difficult to hold the whole story in your mind, especially when you've finished a first draft and are still giddy from the flow of creative juices.

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

The hardest novel to write was Dinner at the Homesick Restaurant.

There are people who say they want to write novels. They think, 'I'll learn my craft on the romance novel.' If you don't love the genre, it's going to show, and it's not going to be a good book.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

I can't write a book like 'Lamb' or 'Fool' every year. It just takes too much research and craft.

I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.

Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.

I write short stories when a little idea occurs to me, that I know isn't a part of a novel that will stand by itself and should be concentrated.

I know authors shouldn't play favorites with books, but 'Release Me' really is right up there for me. The characters truly came alive on the page and drove the story as much as I did from behind the scenes. It was a pleasure to write, and I'm so thrilled that it's the first of a trilogy because I get to spend more time with the characters.

A novel is a work of poetry. In order to write it, one must have tranquility of spirit and of impression.

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'

Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.

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.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.