Naomi Alderman Quotes

Everything I have ever written has been in the same chair, in the same room.

Here I am, where I ought to be. A writer must have a place where he or she feels this, a place to love and be irritated with.

I've always prided myself on my discipline as a writer. I do it like a job. I get up in the morning and go to my desk.

I have a very beautiful room that in my house that we bought in Princeton. It's glass on three sides, and you'd think that's the perfect place to write. Somehow in that nice room I feel too exposed, and I can notice I'm too distracted by things going on, so I end up writing in a not-very-nice office bedroom.

Protect the time and space in which you write. Keep everybody away from it, even the people who are most important to you.

The problem with too beautiful a view is that it's alright for the mulling stage. But for the writing stage, you want to be somewhere without a view, especially if it is very different from what you're writing.

I probably write best in my office, which is an extra bedroom in my house.

I'm not a person who would get up at 5 A.M. to write, but I could sacrifice my Friday night and just order in dinner, sit at home and get into it.

I love to stay at home and write.

I can write in my living room with my wife and kid around.

I just write from dawn to dusk.

I have just been refining the room in which I sit, yet I sometimes doubt that a writer should refine or improve his workroom by so much as a dictionary: one thing leads to another and the first thing you know he has a stuffed chair and is fast asleep in it.

I can only write new words at my desk, the one I've owned for 25 years. When we moved to our new house I designed my office around it. I've written everything I've ever written at this desk.

I don't need music to write, but sometimes I put music on. I don't need special clothes or even my own equipment.

I began by working in a study in an attic, but for many years, I've used a small room in a library. What matters to me isn't decor or comfort but only quiet. I need to hear the rhythms of phrases, the music of sentences. Any place that allows me to do that is good enough.

I wish somebody had given me the news that ideas don't just fall on your head like fairy dust. You have to treat that like a job. You have to spend hours each day, where you're just like, 'This is the part of the day when I'm looking for an idea.'

I have always thought that the place where you sleep or the place you share with your partner should be separate from the place where you write. The domestic rituals and details somehow kill the imagination. They kill the demon in me.

Everything has to be clean and orderly when I sit down to write. I have candles going, and small objects that remind me of what I am working on, or bring me into the world of the character.

I need complete silence when I write.

Anything that keeps you happy and writing is part of my writing ritual: I like music, so I tend to have it playing in the background. But if I'm interested, I can write in an airport waiting areas.

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

Sometimes I write with music on, and if I'm in a good flow, I don't even hear it.

The actual work of recording a record or making a film just requires that you consciously block the time out to do that and nothing else. That's what I do.

I'm such an antsy type of person. I can't write in a room without other people around. I write in coffee shops.

I write anywhere - when I have an idea, it's hard not to write. I used to be kind of precious about where I wrote. Everything had to be quiet and I couldn't be disturbed; it really filled my day.