Stephen Graham Jones Quotes

I have a huge music library and deliberately choose the piece of music to match the piece I'm writing. So, every book I write has its own "soundtrack."

One thing that writers have in common is that they are readers first. They have read lots and lots of stuff, because they're just infested with lots of stuff.

When I write a novel I start each morning by reading for 20 minutes.

When I first wanted to be a writer, I learned to write prose by reading poetry.

It's insane to be a writer and not be a reader. When I'm writing I'm more likely to be reading four or five books at once, just in bits and pieces rather than subjecting myself to a really brilliant book and thinking, "Well what's the point of me writing anything?" I'm more likely to read a book through when I take a break from writing.

a novelist's chief desire is to be as unconscious as possible. He has to induce in himself a state of perpetual lethargy. He wants life to proceed with the utmost quiet and regularity. He wants to see the same faces, to read the same books, to do the same things day after day, month after month, while he is writing, so that nothing may break the illusion in which he is living - so that nothing may disturb or disquiet the mysterious nosings about, feelings around, darts, dashes, and sudden discoveries of that very shy and illusive spirit, the imagination.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

I always think about the books I'm doing in pretty much the same way. I'm simply trying to write that particular novel as well as that particular novel can be written. I want to listen to what it is telling me, trying to figure out what it wants to do as much as what I want to do with it. There's a negotiation that's constant and ongoing between me and the material I'm working with, because I'm trying to listen to it.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Our passions shape our books, repose writes them in the intervals.

The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature. It is a mistake to think that literature can be produced from the raw. One must get out of life...one must become externalised; very, very concentrated, all at one point, not having to draw upon the scattered parts of one's character, living in the brain.

Wait a second while I take a swig off this bottle: it's my true and only Helicon, my Caballine fount, my sole Enthusiasm. Here, drinking, I deliberate, I reason, I resolve and conclude. After the epilogue I laugh, I write, I compose, I drink. Ennius drinking would write, writing would drink.

Sometimes I look back and think, "How did I write that? The book is smarter than I am!" I have never written strategically, but rather, followed the dictates of my muse.

If you eat enough books, you start pooping out words.

At the time I begin writing a novel, the last thing I want to do is follow a plot outline. To know too much at the start takes the pleasure out of discovering what the book is about.

This afternoon, burn down the house. Tomorrow, pour critical water upon the simmering coals. Time enough to think and cut and rewrite tomorrow. But today-explode-f ly-apart-disint egrate! The other six or seven drafts are going to be pure torture. So why not enjoy the first draft, in the hope that your joy will seek and find others in the world who, by reading your story, will catch fire, too?

The most important thing for a writer to do is to write. It really doesn't matter what you write as long as you are able to write fluidly, very quickly, very effortlessly. It needs to become not second nature but really first nature to you. And read; you need to read and you need to read excellent books and then some bad books. Not as many bad books, but some bad books, so that you can see what both look like and why both are what they are.

If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.

All authors know that any book is a casting of runes, a reading of cards, a map of the palm and heart. We make up the ocean - then fall in. But we also write the life raft.

I may have a general broad-based idea of what I want to write about when I sit down to write a book, but I don't have any idea of what it's going to say. I would call my experience of creativity 'inspired by God' to produce certain pieces of information that might be useful to others.

Of all the ways of acquiring books, writing them oneself is regarded as the most praiseworthy method.

To me, every episode is like a song, and every season is like an album. There's that part of the day when you first get the idea and you say, "This could be really funny." And you sit down and you write it. There's just something that happens there that doesn't happen when you really give it a lot of time beforehand.

Writing a book is incredibly pleasurable, but very solitary. You have total control, but sometimes that can drive you insane.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

The ideas for my books come about in two ways. There can be an intellectual idea that seems to be the reason for writing the book. [...] The other motive is unconscious. There is something deeply psychological and emotional that draws me to the material in the first place.