Joanna Trollope Quotes

Whenever I start a new book, I think, 'This is the most interesting subject of all time. It's sad, I'll never enjoy writing another book as much as I enjoy this one.' Every time, I'm convinced. And then I change my mind when I start the next book.

I fear dying in the middle of a book. It would be so annoying to write 80,000 words and not get to the end. I'm phobic about it. So when I'm writing a book I leave messages all over the house for people to know how the story ends, and then someone can finish it for me.

I never think about the actual process of writing. I suppose I have a superstition about examining it too closely.

I always had a superstitious fear of setting up a too well-designed writing place and then finding that the writing had absconded.

It feels wonderful to get praise from other authors who I admire, but with each new book, my confidence is always the thing I struggle with the most until I start getting positive feedback from readers.

Writing is a solitary experience. I'm extremely superstitious. If I talk about the book or name the title out loud before finishing, I feel the energy I need to write will be drained. It's so intimate, I can't even share it with my wife.

Anybody who tells you they're not scared when starting a new book project is a very good liar.

All writers have a love-hate relationship with writing. Performing is fun, too, but I wouldn't say it's my favorite. But the most fulfilling is producing.

Writing is a sufficiently lonely and mysterious pastime that I don't begrudge myself a talisman or two, so long as they don't become ways of distracting myself from the glum inescapability of actual work.

My second novel, "Good Benito", was not finished. I wished that I had spent another year with it.

No book or poem is ever finished, merely abandoned.

Muses are fickle, and many a writer, peering into the voice, has escaped paralysis by ascribing the creative responsibility to a talisman: a lucky charm, a brand of paper, but most often a writing instrument. Am I writing well? Thank my pen. Am I writing badly? Don't blame me blame my pen. By such displacements does the fearful imagination defend itself.

I've just finished reading Reality Hunger and I'm lit up by it-astonished, intoxicated, ecstatic, overwhelmed. . . . It really is an urgent book: a piece of art-making itself, a sublime, exciting, outrageous, visionary volume.

I think one of the reasons I'm so thrilled with writing is because it is an act of reading for me at the same time, which is why my revisions are so sustained.

Nevertheless, hateful as saying 'No' always is to an imaginative person, and certain as the offence may be that it will cause to individuals whose own work does not require isolated effort, the writer who is engaged on a book must learn to say it. He must say it consistently to all interrupters; to the numerous callers and correspondents who want him to speak, open bazaars, see them for 'only' ten minutes, attend literary parties, put people up, or read, correct and find publishers for semi-literate manuscripts by his personal friends.

I'm a physical learner. I learn from writing drafts, not reading them.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

I think a young poet, or an old poet, for that matter, should try to produce something that pleases himself personally, not only when he's written it but a couple of weeks later. Then he should see if it pleases anyone else, by sending it to the kind of magazine he likes reading.

The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease & intimacy with the process of writing... It also offers you a constantly growing knowledge of what has been done and what hasn't, what is trite and what is fresh, what works and what lies there dying (or dead) on the page. The more you read, the less apt you are to make a fool of yourself with your pen or word processor.

TV writing is for people who hate being alone more than they hate writing.

Writing is a difficult trade which must be learned slowly by reading great authors; by trying at the outset to imitate them; by daring then to be original; by destroying one's first productions.

As much as there is joy in writing, there's always the little bit of terror to keep you on edge, on your toes. It is a strange way to occupy yourself - to enjoy your life on a daily basis. There is no guarantee that something great is going to come next.

A writer’s life is in his work, and that is the place to find him.

As I get ready to buy a new computer, I'm stunned at all the many micro drafts, of different chapters and scenes and whatnot, that litter the hard drive.

Saul Bellow once said, 'A writer is a reader who has moved to emulation' — which I think is true. I just started writing and made that jump from reader to writer and learned how hard it was, but also how much fun it was — losing myself in these imaginary worlds.