Jess Walter Quotes

Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.

You can't learn to write that way - by writing directly for the screen. Wait until you're 30. But in the meantime write 200 short stories. You've got to learn how to write!

Most people can start a short story or a novel. If you're a writer, you can finish them. Finish enough of them, and you may be good enough to be publishable.

If you like to tell stories and compose sentences, and if you work hard at being good at these things, then you are a writer even if you haven't published anything.

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

I want to write novels. I want to write stories. I want to do the stuff that I became a writer to do.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

I wrote about four novels before I wrote a word of journalism.

Before trying a novel I wrote a couple of plays.

I'm not a dedicated writer in the sense of Stephen King.

People either fall into two camps, where they're pro-fanfic, or they're anti-fanfic. I would not have had the skills to write and publish my first novel if I hadn't been writing fanfic.

Returning to writing fiction after 13 years away from it. Returning to the rootstock of my whole life as a writer. It's what I had wanted to be for my entire life, since I can remember, since my particular time immemorial. It's how I got my start as a writer.

I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.

To write a short story, you have to be able to stay up all night.

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

Wrote my first "novel" when I was six. Studied a bit in college, but then pursued history... But when I started writing professionally, it was mostly learn as you go.

The first fiction I ever wrote was short stories. I was writing short stories in my late teens and early twenties, and I think it's how you teach yourself to write.

I always wrote. I've written stories since I was 9. We didn't have a computer at home, but my aunt Magda had one. Whenever I'd go to her place, I was in the basement working on her computer, writing stories.

My first novel, 'You Must be Sisters,' was started in Pakistan. I've wrote several novels and a TV drama set or partly-set there.

I'm a novelist who read a lot as a kid. When you grow up on books and then grow up to write books, famous authors are a lot more meaningful to you than TV and movie stars.

My mother wrote a couple of romances when I was a kid, and I always saw books in our bookshelf with 'Schroeder' on the spine.

I've never actually even contemplated writing a book or having a book.

People do write books.

I'm working with published authors and some very young undergraduates and lots of people in between. They are lovely people, and they can write.