Jonathan Dee Quotes

My first true lesson in writing came from Mr. Bowden when I was 16. At my high school, he was the teacher known to be the very best at literature and writing.

I was a good student, but a speech impediment was causing problems. One of my teachers decided that I couldn't pronounce certain words at all. She thought that if I wrote something, I would use words I could pronounce. I began writing little poems. I began to write short stories, too.

One of the things you get to do as a writer is that you get to learn new stuff all the time, and I hope that I'm a better writer when I'm 70 than I was when I was 30. That's one of the great things about a literary career.

Between fourteen and nineteen, I must have begun and abandoned six novels.

The second half of the '60s really was a kind of learning period, in terms of writing, for me.

I wrote two million words of crap. Maybe I'm just a slow learner .

I first tried a novel when I was 14. First finished one when I was 16. First started working on stuff that had a chance of being salable in my early 20s, then didn't write much fiction at all because I was in grad school.

For years, I never really pondered how I came to be a writer from where I came from.

I'm still learning my craft, and I've been writing since I was nine.

Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.

I had a high school English teacher who made me really work at writing. And once, when I got an assignment back, she'd written: 'This is so good, Andrew. This should be published!' That made a big impression on me.

I wrote a few unsuccessful screenplays before I wrote 'Before the Devil Knows You're Dead.' I wrote them as television plays that never got made. I'm glad I wrote them - I think it was a good experience.

Were there stories I wrote along the way that were terrible clinkers? God, yes. But they were all a product of their time, and I did the best I could.

In the early '70s - a very good time for children's books and their authors - editors and publishers were willing to take a chance on a new writer. They were willing and able to invest their time in nurturing writers with promise, encouraging them.

It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.

I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.

I have a pretty healthy perspective on what my past music was.

The stuff that I learned on 'Sons,' the education of how to tell stories, was part of that mythology. It's hard to look at it and go, 'Oh, if I knew this, I would have done it this way,' because the fact is I like to think that all that sort of unraveled as it was supposed to.

For me, working on original material is very important.

Everything I do is a learning experience. It's still fun to me because I grow with every project and every song.

That's the most important thing for me is just figuring out how and if I'm growing as an artist.

A lot of people ask me, did debating help me as a writer, and I honestly don't know.

Anything I wrote before the age of 17 is probably worth putting a pin in and moving on.

I didn't do anything but write for six months after I got my publishing deal. That was just trying to get better and figure out my sound and the way I like to do it.

I was a terrible writer at first.