Rick Riordan Quotes

I write everything I do. On the average, it takes you about sixty months from the first molecule of an idea to it being in front of an audience. I'm actually somebody that creates their own stuff.

I can write a book in probably three months.

The hardest part about writing fiction is finding long stretches of time to do it: for me, this means writing mostly on Saturdays and Sundays. But I am always thinking about my characters, jotting down ideas in stolen moments and hoping I'll be able to make sense of them when the weekend rolls around.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.

I was very fortunate that my first novel captivated the imaginations of so many readers who asked for a sequel. After that, one book led to another as I discovered other facets to my characters I wanted to investigate further.

If you write, one of the questions you're always trying to answer is, Where do you get your ideas? And, if you write, you know how pointless a question this is and how difficult it is to answer.

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

When I sit down to write, I don't think about writing about an idea or a given message. I just try to write a story which is hard enough.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

When I'm writing, I try not to think things like, 'Gosh, I have to finish writing this book.' Books are very long and it's easy to get discouraged. Instead I think to myself, 'Wow, I have this great story idea, and today I'm going to write two pages of it. That's all - just two pages.'

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'm not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

No ideas are harmed in the making of my books, by the way. All I do with my best ideas is run with them, fast as I can, taking notes and occasionally suggesting a left hand turn rather than the right hand one which might have taken us both over a precipice.

I know it's working when I'm writing a book if I'm laughing or crying.

In the morning, Capra would arrive with twenty-or-so pages in which he'd written down all of his ideas. Most were terrible, then all of a sudden there would be one which was astounding.

I think 'Hollow City' only took a year and a half to write... but it felt like two and a half!

Where story comes from, I don't know. I know that I become obsessed with something. An idea, an image, a person, the way a person talks. And then something starts happening that I can't explain, and it has a lot to do with language.

I do a lot better if I sit around and think about a character for a couple of months.

Every book has got its challenges. You run into a plot point that you can't figure out, or a scene that you struggle to write and have to write 50 times.

If you write a novel alone you sit and you weave a little narrative. And it's O.K., but it's of no account.

As always, we start off with asking, 'What's a good episode?' We don't think about timing, and we don't think about logistics. We just think about what would be good.

It is actually a lot harder to sit down and write from A to Z. But for me at least, it's the only way I can do it, at this point, with any moderate success.