Simon Mawer Quotes

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

Struggling writers are often advised to pick a simple genre, but it doesn't work that way.

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

Those of us who write spend our entire lives in an endless English class.

As an observer, I'm analysing my reactions, I guess, and my thinking; but about the process of writing... I am not very talented at talking about what I do as a writer.

Of course I knew that writing was terrifically hard work and that there was no secret code, as in a video game, that would unlock Tolstoy-mode, enabling me to crank out canon-worthy novellas before lunch.

I knew I would read all kinds of books and try to get at what it is that makes good writers good. But I made no promises that I would write books a lot of people would like to read.

Writing a novel - unlike operating a piece of heavy machinery, say, or cooking a chicken - is not a skill that can be taught. There is no standard way of doing it, just as there is no means of telling, while you're doing it, whether you're doing it well or badly. And merely because you've done it well once doesn't mean you can do it well again.

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

I've always liked new writing.

I don't actually have a one wellspring of inspiration. Though I'm most often inspired while reading - both fiction and nonfiction.

Neophyte writers tend to believe that there is something magical about ideas and that if they can just get a hold of a good one, then their futures are ensured.

Before Arthur, I'd dismissed altogether writing fiction. You only have so many semi-sharp arrows in your quiver, I'd told myself, and I was not going to be able to write a novel.

I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer.

Now I'm not an author, I'm a writer, that's all I am.

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

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

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult if I'm not sure where the story is going.

I was writing novels in high school and apprenticed myself in a way both to Faulkner and to Hemingway.

I think a man turns into a writer by editing his own texts.

Novel writing is solitary work.