E. L. Doctorow Quotes

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

My novels come from within me; they are things I feel I want to do.

Blank paper has always inspired me.

Everything can be grist for the muse. Sometimes, writers draw on personal experiences. 'Ghoul' was just that.

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.

My favourite part of writing a book is thinking up the ideas, and that can start a long time before I actually sit down at my desk.

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking, 'I really want to write a novel.'

A lot of my ideas for books come from newspaper articles. But I don't like to be actively looking for ideas.

I don't have goals when writing books, apart from getting to the end. I have rather vague ideas about how I want things to feel, I'm big on ambience. I have a title, a beginning and a probable ending and go from there.

Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.

My next book - each one while I'm working on it - dances in my mind and thrills me at every turn. If it didn't, why would I write it?

It is very enjoyable, writing a story. You get this idea. It takes hold of you. And then you spend day and night thinking about how to do it. And then you do it. And much later, you think, 'Oh, yes. That's an interesting question.'

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

For me, inspiration isn't a sort of spark which lights the fire of the story. It's more like a thread, one of many, which you can tease out of a story once it's written, if you feel so inclined.

Sometimes I'll have an idea for a story or have a subject, and that will inspire lyrics, but most of the time, hopefully, they already exist somewhere else.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

I have no plans for a future Jemima Shore mystery, but would write one tomorrow if a good idea came to me.

I'm one of the lucky writers: plots come easily to me.

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 all writers write from the time they're really young, and you just start asking the question, 'What if?'

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

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

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

I think there is often a 'what if' proposition that gets me thinking about all my novels.

Writing is a mysterious process, and many ideas come from deep within the imagination, so it's very hard to say how characters come about. Mostly, they just happen.