Alan Furst Quotes

I know that to write you have to have stories you want to tell. You have to keep your mind alive, and you have to work hard.

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

I'm pretty much writing all the time.

I spend 99 percent of my time writing.

I'm constantly writing.

To be a writer, you need to like spending a lot of time by yourself in the company of imaginary people.

Writing is work. It takes a lot of contemplation, concentration, and out-and-out sweat. People tend to romanticize it, that somehow your work appears by benefit of some mystical external force. In reality, to be a writer, you have to sit down and write. It's work, and often it's hard work.

It takes a long, long time to write what I do write.

The real writer is one who really writes. Talent is an invention like phlogiston after the fact of fire. Work is its own cure. You have to like it better than being loved.

The biggest mistake you can make is assuming that creativity will hit you all at once and the muse will carry you to the end of the book on feather wings while 'Foster the People' plays gently in the background. Storytelling is work. Pleasurable work, usually, but it is work.

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

Our job, as writers is to do our jobs.

Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page.

I am very fortunate in that I have spent pretty much my whole life being a writer, and before I was a writer, I was a storyteller.

There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.

The most important lesson my parents taught me is that writing is a job, one that requires discipline and commitment. Most of the time it's a fun job, a wonderful job, but sometimes it isn't, and those are the days that test you.

There is no motivation higher than being a good writer.

I would say, number one, don't worry about getting published. Just write. Number two, just write. Three is make sure you read.

I think writing well takes a little bit of talent and an awful lot of work.

No one can teach writing, but classes may stimulate the urge to write. If you are born a writer, you will inevitably and helplessly write. A born writer has self-knowledge. Read, read, read. And if you are a fiction writer, don't confine yourself to reading fiction. Every writer is first a wide reader.

For me, writing is 75 percent procrastinating and 25 percent actually sitting down and working.

To be a dramatic writer takes hard work, talent, and discipline. And that's why I just make up crap.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Writing - not being a writer with interesting habits - gets priority.