Scott Turow Quotes

I always wanted to be a writer... 'Critical Care' was my first published work. I was 34 when it came out. I was accumulating 'Critical Care' for years. I would go for a whole year and not touch it. And then I'd go back to it.

The first thing I tried to write was a novel, when I took that time off in grad school. Then I didn't finish it. I went back to school, and then I started writing nonfiction kind of by accident.

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.

I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.

Writing is an extremely rewarding and humbling process, and I've learned to go with it, that even if it feels absolutely impossible, I will find a way to tell the next story.

I'm a successful novelist, and I've been a lucky one, so I don't want to cry the poor mouth. Writing has never been easy.

My theory is that I decided to be a writer when I was about seven, but of course it is not as simple as that. Like most writers, I had to work at other things to earn a living and wrote mainly in the evenings, often very late at night, for many years.

I write as a matter of need - seven books and God knows how many short stories before anyone published me.

By the time I was 23 or 24 and had written the first manuscript of 'The Final Winter', I knew I wanted to make it a career but didn't know how. It took me a long time to grow into myself, but when my love of writing returned, it did so with an enormous amount of venom. It is now a mainstay in my life.

At a certain point in the writing of any book, you become absolutely certain that it's terrible and is only getting more terrible with every word you write. This is normal. You just have to keep going, push your way through, and have faith that, through practice and experience and determination, you will get to the end.

My early life had a lot to do with my origins as a writer, but I didn't get into doing any writing at all until I was about 35 years old.

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

At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.

I was twenty-seven when I began to write seriously, and after two years of rejections, my first book, 'The One in the Middle is the Green Kangaroo,' was accepted for publication.

The soles of the best writers, a professor once told me, are worn down to holes. This is an incomplete measure, but the image of a writer grinding his or her shoes against curbs and cobblestones stuck with me. The story is always out there, the details around the corner or down the alley.

I sold a book six years after I left an MFA program. In between, there was a lot of endurance of poverty and a lot of fighting off doubt. It's all a part of the process of being or becoming a writer.

This is for writers yet to be published who think the uphill climb will never end. Keep believing. This is also for published writers grown jaded by the process. Remember how lucky you are.

I think I'm more sympathetic to writers, to the work and the struggle and the craft of it, than when I was in graduate school at NYU and was very judgmental.

I began writing seriously in my mid-20s and didn't publish my first book until I was 41.

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

I started blogging in 2006 when I had sold my first novel but it had not yet been published, in those anxious months in between while I learned the whole process.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

As soon as I finished the first book, I wrote a second, which I hope to sell this year, and I have just about finished the third book in the series. Two more are already outlined. I'm in this for the long haul.

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn't give it up because by that time I was too famous.