Joseph Heller Quotes

I've always had ideas for more books than I can write.

I've always kind of wrote when I wanted to. Once I get the idea in my head and get it outlined out, I usually just sit and write until it's done.

I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.

The best ideas are those that really affect me emotionally - those are the ones you never forget. You think to yourself, 'I want to write that book', for years; those are the ideas that I love to work with, and 'The Bone Garden' was one of them.

I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

I think I settled on the title before I ever wrote the book.

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

To write, I think one must sit in one place and be bored. Boredom is a very good state for writers to be. Things cook away in your head when you're bored, and suddenly one day, you have a book or a germ of a book.

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

I always have a story in my head that needs to be written, or at least I think I do. But I usually can't find the time to write it.

I might be into writing... I'd like to try it someday. I always come up with some good ideas.

Can you write 200 words a day? 100? 50? In six months, 50 words a day is 9,000 words. That's 2-3 short stories. If you did 200 words every day, in three months that's 36,000 words. That's half a short novel.

I'm still surprised to be an author. I wonder what I'll write next?

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

Going off the road just leaves me more time to be a writer.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

I wanted to write it long before I wrote Every Night, Josephine! I'd been thinking about it a long time.

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

When you're my age and you see a story, you better go for it pretty quickly. I'd just like to get a few more novels under my belt.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

I wrote 'Legends of the Fall' in nine days, but I had been thinking about it for a few years.

I don't think there was a time I ever thought of myself as anything but a writer. I thought I was going to be the next Toni Morrison.

I didn't really start to write until I was almost 30, and I started with the short stories.

As a writer, you look for inspiration wherever you can get it.