Peter Matthiessen Quotes

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 never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

I like to sit down every day and not know where the book is going. I have no idea where the book is going to go or how it's going to end as I'm writing it.

Part of writing a novel is being willing to leap into the blackness. You have very little idea, really, of what's going to happen. You have a broad sense, maybe, but it's this rash leap.

When I write, I operate as a writer and a reader both - I never know what's going to happen.

I prefer to surprise myself as I'm writing. I'm not interested in it if I already know where it's going. So I have only the most general sense of what I'm doing when I start a story. I sometimes have a destination in mind, but how the story is going to go from Point A to Point Z is something I make up as I go along.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

My own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It's just a matter of joining the dots.

When I wrote my first novel - I was nineteen - I did it very quickly. If you write fast, you feel like you're entering something not yet familiar - a world rather than thoughts about the world.

I don't know exactly where the ideas come from. One day, a sentence just popped into my head - 'There was going to be trouble, and, hell, he just wasn't in the mood for it' - and I knew I had a novel.

When I write a book, I don't have an idea of what I'm doing. I just go where it leads.

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

With a novel, there is no hurrying it. You're constantly walking into the unknown.

I've never written a book with an outline or a predetermined theme. It's only in retrospect that themes or subjects become identifiable. That's the fun of it: discovering what's next. I'm often surprised by plot developments I would not have dreamed of starting out, but that, in the course of the writing, come to seem inevitable.

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

I never know how a novel is going to end, because you don't really know what's going to be at the bottom of a novel until you excavate it.

There are a few really fantastic stories left, and that kind of gives you some inspiration to find even new ones.

I was about 28-29 when I wrote my first story, and that was called 'The Garden of Abdul Gasazi.'

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

'For Whom the Bell Tolls' was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

I always think I know the way a novel will go. I write maps on oversized art pads like the kind I carried around in college when I was earnest about drawing. I need to have some idea of the shape of the novel, where its headed, so that I can proceed with confidence. But the truth is my characters start doing and saying things I don't expect.

When people find out that I've written 208 novels, they ask, 'How did you think of all that?' Well, I answer, 'How do you not think of it?' I see a gum wrapper on the ground, and I think, 'Oh, a Russian spy probably dropped that.' I just think like that, and those thoughts go through my mind constantly.

When I write, I get glimpses into future novels.

I really don't know what I am going to do in terms of what a book is going to be about until I actually start writing it!

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.