Thomas Steinbeck Quotes

My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine.

I'm not in the Shakespeare stakes. I have no ambition.

I'm not saying it never occurred to me to want to write a masterpiece, but I really doubt I could.

I wish I could spend six years writing one novel.

All my friends who wanted to write had got nowhere trying to write the great European novel. So I deliberately steered clear of that and set out to write something story-led.

Of course I planned to write the Great American Novel; that lasted about a week, at which point I decided I had nothing to say that could possibly qualify. So I wrote a romance instead.

Once I finished 'Eileen,' I wanted to write more novels. I don't see myself stopping any time soon.

I hope to build a reputation as a science-fiction writer. That's the pitch. We'll see.

I was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

I was saving the name of 'Geisel' for the Great American Novel.

It took seven years from the day I decided I wanted to write fiction to actually getting a book published.

I never wanted to be anything but a writer, and I never let go of it.

To be a writer was always my greatest aim. I remember writing a play about Guy Fawkes when I was 10. I suppose it's significant, at least to me, that my first work should be about a historical figure.

I wanted to be a writer from my early teenage years, but I never told anyone. Writers, in my opinion, were god-like creatures, and to say I was striving to be a writer would be incredibly arrogant.

I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I would write historical fiction. I never thought I might write academic history because I simply wasn't good enough!

With this first novel, I am just above the foothills, but I see the path to the top, and it is my desire to write compelling stories about everything that I find of interest.

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.

Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.

I don't think there was a time I ever thought of myself as anything but a writer. I thought I was going to be the next Toni Morrison.

It used to be that the highest ambition of American novelists was to write 'the Great American Novel,' that great white whale of American fiction that would encompass all the American experience in one great book.

The idea of being published was such an abstract thing in the beginning. It wasn't even an option in my mind.

My goal is to write one book of fiction, and that's all I want to do. It takes so much time, and I don't really have enough time. But I admire writers so much.

It's really hard to be a story writer - no matter how much acclaim you get - and not write a novel.

In the end, for me, the sole single goal is to write the best novel that I can. Whether or not it gets made or gets purchased.