Ismail Kadare Quotes

I wander around the house and write in bed, at the kitchen table, by the window, in the yard.

I don't think there's a shortage of material in the world. Or in my head. I just pray for continued good health, because I've got other stories to tell.

I wrote large chunks of 'The Impostor' and 'The Good Doctor' on a beach in Goa.

That's what I find with any good song, you just have to let it happen. Out of about twenty songs you might write, one of any significance. It might be thirty or forty, but I just keep churning them out and churning them out in hope that one of them will stick.

I swim in a sea of words. They flow around me and through me and, by a process that is not fully clear to me, some delicate hidden membrane draws forth the stuff that is the necessary condition of my life.

Sometimes I write with music on, and if I'm in a good flow, I don't even hear it.

I don't need the water to be inspired. My stories inspire me, not the location of where I'm parked. And good thing, since I've had to finish books in airports, in the RV we used to have, the lake house, while on vacation, at home, in the kitchen when my office PC was on the fritz.

So usually even if you like a sentence or a story or something, it won't come out that way - it'll come out years later, and in a different way, and you don't really control that.

I wrote all four of my books at Starbucks.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

Everything I write, I've written the first draft in Austria.

As a writer, when you fall in love with a place, you want to spend more time in it, either physically or mentally, and so you write about it.

When I write, I normally write anywhere that I can feel at peace, so if it's in my bedroom, if it's at the park, if it's by a lake somewhere, wherever I feel calm is where I like to write.

I'm fully conscious of the fact that I wouldn't be the writer that I am without this place, without Vermont College.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

I write in a rush of memory.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it's because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me.

You know how sometimes you hear a chord played on an organ and you can feel it vibrating in your bones? Sometimes when I'm writing, I can feel my bones vibrating because I'll have a thought or I'll have a character's voice in my head, and that's when I know I'm on the right track.

I write every day... I never get ideas unless I'm actually writing. Ideas I get in the shower don't do me any good.

I can see a scene in my head, and when I try to get it down in words on paper, the words are clunky; the scene is not coming across right. So frustrating. And there are days where it keeps flowing. Open the floodgates, and there it is. Pages and pages coming. Where the hell does this all come from? I don't know.

I have a notebook with me all the time, and I begin scribbling a few words. When things are going well, the walk does not get anywhere; I finally just stop and write.