Anthony Horowitz Quotes

It's hard to do fiction and nonfiction simultaneously.

The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.

Every writer has his writing technique - what he can and can't do to describe something like war or history. I'm not good at writing about those things, but I try because I feel it is necessary to write that kind of thing.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.

The requests for blurbs seem to come in waves. I'm not sure what precipitates them. I think it must be excruciating for editors to draft those elaborate letters asking for a blurb, and I know it's torturous for us writers to ask directly. But publishers encourage us to. Rock and a hard place.

Novel writing is far and away the most exhausting work I know.

The fact is that in this day and age I don't think any novelist can assume that a book will get attention.

My energies get used up quite quickly, and the psychic space I'm in when I write is a very lonely one, so I found that harder and harder to get back to.

I started writing 'The Lord of Opium' in 2008 and produced about 80 pages before disaster struck. Three eye operations nearly put an end to my career.

You write a book and you finish the book. That's your job done, right? You win the Booker and you have a whole new job. You have to be the thing, right? So instead of writing the story, you somehow are the story. And that I found that sort of terrible.

For a long time, I've had a recurring dream - I dream I don't have to write any more, that I'm free. I'm not free, alas; I'm still clearing the same terrain, with the impression that it's never finished.

I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.

I'm terrible at story and structure, but I'm not so bad at writing dialogue.

The thing with being on a series that runs that long is that the writers run out of things to do.

Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me.

I find coming up with a title the hardest part of writing a novel.

It is hard work to give life to new characters every single day. It is not as if I am God. I am just a tired, middle-aged woman trying to keep going.

I've always found the second book in a series is the hardest to write.

I've had aunts and uncles who not only haven't read my books but could hardly believe that I was a writer.

The most difficult novel I have had to write in terms of just getting it done was The Vampire Lestat. It took a year to write.

Well, I'm a slow writer. For me, a good day is a page, maybe a page and a half. I'd love to be more efficient, but I am not.

J. K. Rowling's first 'Harry Potter' manuscript was rejected 12 times. Stephen King's 'Carrie' was rejected 30 times. 'Gone With The Wind' was rejected 38 times. I was immensely proud to have beaten them all.

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

Because the more you write the more you're aware of the weight of your tradition and the difficulties of the form and the more you have already done that you do not want to do again.