Saul David Quotes

A short-story collection is harder to formulate pithy sentences about.

There's nothing more painful than writing.

I started a second novel seven times and I had to throw them away.

While writing a novel, I don't read anything new in fiction. I am too engrossed.

Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

Plot is not my forte. It's like I have to live in my head in the book for a while before I figure out what the story is... My process is a bit messier.

Actually, after while, finding the ideas is the easy part. Sorting them through and turning them into stories, now, that's the hard work.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

I was writing fiction, but not finishing fiction.

Oh you know, I've been writing a novel.

For after my marriage I had made various attempts to write fiction. They were clearly failures.

I've never been a true fan of the short story and have only published a single example of my own.

Every story teaches me how to write it. Unfortunately, it doesn't teach me how to write the next one.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

I love rewriting because that is where and how you discover the story. It's like you have this skeleton, and you get to put flesh on it and hair and clothes and really wonderful jewelry.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don't think out the plot ahead of time.

I'm not a fast writer, and I find the process of writing a first draft to be painful and frustrating. Usually, I start with a character, a premise, and some image that gives me a particular feeling.

Once I've discovered the story, I might restructure it, maybe move things around, set up a clue that something is going to happen later, but that happens much later in an editorial capacity.

In general, when I'm writing, I concentrate on the story itself, and I leave it to other people, such as agents and publishers, to work out who it's for.

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

I do think novels are overlooked. I did write one some years ago that I think is quite good, called 'The End of the Story,' not to blow my own horn.

Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.

In the writing process, the more a story cooks, the better.