Cynthia Kadohata Quotes

I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.

After I'd been a lawyer for about five or six years, I started playing around with fiction.

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

I obviously prefer writing novels but I take my journalism very seriously, and I enjoy doing it between novels. It gives me an opportunity to move in the outside world.

I thought I wanted to be a journalist or a novelist.

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

My intent was to gain experience for fiction I eventually hoped to write. But there's no question I was drawn in by the hope that journalism would be a creative, thrilling environment.

Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

As long as I can remember, I wanted to be a writer.

At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.

I've wanted to be a writer since I was, like, 10.

I guess, when I left university, I liked the idea of being a writer, and I thought then that being a writer really meant that you were a novelist. But if one of the impulses for being a novelist is wanting to be a storyteller, I never had any urge to tell stories.

Really, I've worked my whole adult life at fiction, to try and write fiction.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

Every 'Observer' writer wants to be a novelist.

I started out as a novelist and wrote several novels before deciding to publish one, and I fully intend to go back to the form.

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.

I started out as a poet. I've always been a poet since I was 7 or 8. And so I feel myself to be fundamentally a poet who got into writing novels.

I always knew I wanted to be a writer.

Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it well or badly. And merely because you've done it well once doesn't mean you can do it well again.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

I became a copy boy. Not for long. I started writing stories.

I took two years away from making films to write a novel.

I don't begin a novel with a shopping list - the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it.