Daniel H. Wilson Quotes

I want a career writing these novels that I can be proud of. And then I want one as a screenwriter.

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.

When I was 30 or so - by that time I had become an assistant D.A. - I decided I would try to write a novel. To be clear: I did not decide to become a novelist. Honestly, it never crossed my mind that I could actually earn a living as a professional novelist.

I always wanted to write fiction. Always. As far back as I can remember it's been integral to my sense of myself - everything else was always a displacement activity.

The decision to write full time was made when I was twenty-eight years old and had just had two small plays accepted for BBC Radio.

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

I had to wait for a long time before I could support myself with writing. However, being a writer is what I have most wanted to be, from the time I was a child.

Writing my first book, I think in hindsight I went into it saying, 'It's gonna sell.' I was earning enough to scrape by sometime around a book or two before 'Tell No One.' I moved up from $50,000 to $75,000, then $150,000 for each book. I had never thought I would be doing anything else. I had enough encouragement.

The way a small child might dream of visiting Disneyland, I dreamed of writing books. Never did I think my poems would become that.

Hopefully, if I get enough of a fan army together, people will let me write fiction.

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.

I had a vision of myself as a novelist because that was where I could be serious. I couldn't with music.

There is no magic in all the world like that magic when you sell your first bit of writing.

In 1970, at the age of 14, I entered a short story contest offering a grand prize of one dollar. I won. This was my first foray into writing fiction. I loved reading and thought that it shouldn't be so hard to write a story.

I don't reckon there are many writers who start out really expecting writing to be an attainable occupation. Well, I didn't. It was a pipe dream.

Well, I always wanted to write from the time I was very little, and my mother encouraged me. She wrote a journal from the time she was 15 up until about the age of 76.

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.

I saw novelists as being admirable people and I thought... I thought... maybe, one day, I could be one of them.

When I was young, I wrote everything, and I thought I would be an all around writer, that I would write everything.

I was always a keen reader. I jotted down one or two things, but it never occurred to me to think of a job in writing. I thought that writers were like demi-gods. I don't know what I thought.

I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel.

As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that's a disguise for being a writer.

I always had a passion to write as a young girl.

I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.

I wanted to write a novel. At 12 I knew, I am a writer. I said it to nobody.