Graham Joyce Quotes

I've been writing full-time since 1978.

I started writing seriously about 1960, at the fairly advanced age of 30.

I've been writing full-time since about 1984 - mostly magazine features and columns.

I never imagined when I began writing in the early 1960s I'd become professional and my life would be transformed.

I've been writing since I was really young, so I considered myself a writer for a really long time.

I had been writing professionally since 1988.

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.

I've always wanted to be a part of that experience of writing to an audience that is just starting to fall in love with books. When I felt that my writing for adults had become cemented, I decided to write a YA series.

I took my first creative writing class when I was 24, then went onto to get a graduate degree in poetry. I've sort of never looked back from there.

I started submitting stories for publication when I was about 15, but it was many years before I sold anything. I don't make my living writing science fiction, so in that sense, I'm still not a pro.

I think I would have been a writer, anyhow, in the sense of having written a story every now and then, or continued writing poetry. But it was the war experience and the two novels I wrote about Vietnam that really got me started as a professional writer.

I know that sometimes it happens that a novelist is embarrassed about their early works. For me, it's the opposite: I believe 'Durable Goods' is the best thing I've written.

I didn't write any fiction until I was past thirty.

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.

I had to see and feel and be with the thing that I wanted to write about.

Write a million words before thinking about getting published.

So usually even if you like a sentence or a story or something, it won't come out that way - it'll come out years later, and in a different way, and you don't really control that.

There are stories still in existence that I wrote when I was five. However, I did not get published until I was seven.

The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'

For years, I felt I was a novelist, but now I know I can write short fiction.

Although I always loved reading and putting words on paper, I never thought about becoming a writer until I was twelve.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

I'm like a unicorn; I'm a midlist writer who hasn't done anything else but write. But because I wasn't amazingly famous, I didn't become Stephanie Meyer, or even a huge literary name like a Jonathan Franzen or a Joshua Ferris.

By the time I was 23 or 24 and had written the first manuscript of 'The Final Winter', I knew I wanted to make it a career but didn't know how. It took me a long time to grow into myself, but when my love of writing returned, it did so with an enormous amount of venom. It is now a mainstay in my life.