George Pelecanos Quotes

I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

For any writers at all, read everything you can and then put your butt in the chair and write. That's all there is to it.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.

I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.

It really wasn't until I was in college when I began to write more and more, and I realized I was scheduling my entire life around my writing.

I really try to write every day. It's hard, but it's my favorite thing to do, so it's usually not too, too hard.

I started writing when I was about 20, 21 maybe.

Luckily I haven't fallen into the trap, which has claimed so many writers, of living from day to day thinking 'Ah, I'll write a book about that.'

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

The point always is to be writing something - it leads to more writing.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

And I have this little litany of things they can do. And the first one, of course, is to write - every day, no excuses. It's so easy to make excuses. Even professional writers have days when they'd rather clean the toilet than do the writing.

I'm very interested in writing - it just takes so much discipline, whether it's short stories or novels.

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

Novel writing is solitary work.

But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That's all.

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.