Earl King Quotes

Blank paper has always inspired me.

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

I tend to have an endless number of ideas for writing projects. I don't necessarily say that as a good thing. Maybe it's a good thing, but I have ideas for all kinds of projects: contemporary novels, graphic novels, anything that happens to go through my mind.

I think a conceptual idea comes to me first - something I've been mulling over a lot right before I feel like writing a book - and then the characters start to develop around it.

Rarely does a complete idea come to me. I basically start with just a small scene or a snatch of dialogue and force myself to write and to keep writing. Sometimes it becomes a book.

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

You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.

It's kind of a mysterious process, but something will catch my attention, and I'll make a note about it. I may even write a few pages about it, and then I'll put it aside, but I'll sort of keep it in mind. Then as time goes on, other things will gather to it as if it's a magnet, almost, and eventually, there's enough to make the story.

I consider the process of gestation just as important as when you're actually sitting down putting words to the paper.

I always say that, for me, writing a book is like a wacky Greyhound bus trip - I know where I'm starting and where I'll end up, but I have no idea what will happen along the way.

I just sit down and the page just comes out and I look at it and the elements that appear on that page have a lot to do with what's going on in my life.

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

When I write, it's like watching a movie in my head.

The task of a writer consists of being able to make something out of an idea.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I start with an idea that is no more than a paragraph long, and expand it slowly into an outline. But I'm always surprised by the directions things take when I actually start writing.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

When I sit down to write, I know everything I need to know... I start writing, and within 30 seconds or 60 seconds, I'm watching a movie. I'm not making this stuff up; the characters are acting it out, and I'm just writing it down.

My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

You should be writing for the love of the story, and when it comes time to return to the manuscript, everything else belongs behind a closed door.

I don't take notes. I don't have any notebooks. I keep on trying to do that because it seems like a very writerly thing to do, but my mind doesn't work that way. I tend to get the idea for a novel in a big splash.

A lot of my ideas for books come from newspaper articles. But I don't like to be actively looking for ideas.

My process is thinking, thinking and thinking - thinking about my stories for a long time.