Ned Beauman Quotes

I won't read novels while writing novels.

When I am writing novels I don't read a lot of novels so I try to catch up in-between.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

I enjoy being influenced by other writers.

I always have a book that I use that somehow inspires my novels.

As an author, you need to keep talking to your audience to remind yourself what they like and what they don't like. You spend most of your life locked in a room, and you need to be social occasionally.

When I'm working on a novel of my own, I try to read mostly nonfiction, although sometimes I break down and peek at something else.

So, whenever I'm writing, I'm writing in the presence of all the other books I've read and I think we all are.

I don't usually think of my writing as a 'challenge' because I enjoy the process so much. I suppose that's what's helped me to avoid 'writer's block' all these years.

I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.

I love working with genre. And to me, the Victorian novel is the flourishing ancestor I'm always trying to access when I write.

I've never made an outline for any novel that I've written. Never.

I don't think they [contemporary writers] read me either. I mean, if we're concerned genuinely with writing, I think we probably get on with our work.

Poetry can only be made out of other poems; novels out of other novels.

The beauty of my work is that my sets cost nothing. That's what I love about being a writer of novels.

I had to educate him that there was no such thing as writer's block, that writers write when they write, and when they don't, they don't.

The only way to get anything out of a writer's brains is to leave him or her alone until he or she is damn well ready to write it down.

A poet or novelist will invent interruptions to avoid long consecutive days at the ordained page; and of these the most pernicious are other kinds of writing -- articles, lectures, reviews, a wide correspondence.

I've never been that person who thought that because I've written one novel, I should write another and another. It's only when there was another novel to write that I was going to write another.

I don't have a name and I don't have a plot. I have the typewriter and I have white paper and I have me, and that should add up to a novel.

Before writers are writers they are readers, living in books, through books, in the lives of others that are also the heads of others, in that act that is so intimate and yet so alone.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

Writer’s block results from too much head. Cut off your head. Pegasus, poetry, was born of Medusa when her head was cut off. You have to be reckless when writing. Be as crazy as your conscience allows.

If I had to write a rough draft, all the way through and then go back and start over, I probably would just stop writing. I wouldn't find that interesting. I would feel that I had committed so many things to the paper that I couldn't easily undo because one thing leads to the next, the interconnectedness, the sequences would make it very hard to change something that simply didn't work.

I suppose I have written novels to find out what I thought about something and poems to find out what I felt about something.