Jane Green Quotes

My own career started in New York at the 'Associated Press', a fast-paced news agency where we rarely had time for deep reporting.

Writing for Mills and Boon taught me a lot of discipline. You have to produce books in a short time scale and four a year, and it teaches you a lot.

I'm used to writing stories with a beginning a middle and an end in four minutes.

The biggest influence on my books was the fact that I had worked in a newspaper for so long. In a daily paper, you learn to write very quickly; there is no time to sit and brood about what you are going to say.

In the TV business, you've got to write fast, and someone will tell you, 'Can you rewrite this episode before... 6 P.M.?' So that's when you rewrite it. You can't wait for the muse to show up.

The best writers who have put pen to paper have often had a journalism background.

When you're writing for newspapers you have all these parameters. You can't swear, you have to use short paragraphs, all that. If you stay within those parameters, you have lots of freedom because you're writing for the next day.

I was fortunate that I was at newspapers for eight years, where I wrote at least five or six stories every week. You get used to interviewing lots of different people about a lot of different things. And they aren't things you know about until you do the story.

On the 'Star,' you were forced to learn to write a simple declarative sentence. This is useful to anyone. Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.

If you want to get an education in how to get a story and how to survive, then get a street reporter job in New York City.

I'm a fast writer, and crime novels are easy to do. It's much harder to write a 1,000 word article, where everything has to be 100 per cent correct.

My personal opinion is that, if you're a professional writer, that you do have quotas. So every day I do try to write 800-1,200 words. I don't always achieve it, and the reality is that a lot of the words I write will end up on the cutting-room floor.

Three hundred words in a day is not a lot. So much of it is thinking before writing. And then there's the cutting. But you do what you do and keep moving forward.

My experience is that prose usually equals duty - last minute, overdue-deadline stuff or a panic lecture to be written.

Particularly in the final stages I always find that I'm rushed. It's dangerous when you're rushed in the editing stage, most of my early films are flawed in the cutting.

Being an editor doesn't make you a better writer - or vice versa. The worst thing any editor can do is be in competition with his writer.

But even writing the column for the 'Telegraph,' that idea of working to deadlines, which as an actor that's not something you have to do in the same way. It's excited me into wanting to do a bit more.

The problem with writing a monthly book is that you're going through your work like a man running for a bus, red-faced and out of breath. There isn't time for reflection or critical self-examination.

I write fast, I write beautifully, I write convincingly.

I assume that - because you can get degrees in journalism from very reputable universities - I assume that people can be trained to be journalists. I've never been entirely certain that anyone can be trained to be a novelist in the same way.

I started off as a journalist when I was young and I did not get paid unless I wrote three stories a day.

There is no writer's block in a newsroom. There's only unemployment block.

To me, the newspaper business was a way to learn about life and how things worked in the real world and how people spoke. You learn all the skills - you learn to listen, you learn to take notes - everything you use later as a novelist was valuable training in the newspaper world. But I always wanted to write novels.

Writers' bedtimes vary, but few have been spared the shock of a copy editor's early wake-up call.

With TV, you just have to finish the days and get the episodes out. And it's always going to be an impossible schedule. That's the funny thing with TV that not a lot of people realize.