Louis MacNeice Quotes

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

It takes a long time to write a novel when you have to keep interrupting your work to earn money.

Many of my books have begun with the title, because naming a work already in progress makes no sense to me.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

A lot of people, I think, harbor some kind of ambition to write a novel - they say, 'One day I'm going to write a novel,' and they maybe find the first three pages quite easy, and then they hit a kind of brick wall, and they think that that brick wall means that they're not a writer.

I would like to one day write a nice big novel and enjoy writing it and people enjoy reading it but I cannae be bothered or I don't have any ideas that would fill up a big book like that.

I'm a really slow writer. What I need to start writing on any given day, is a kernel, a line of dialogue, anything I can sense concretely.

I don't wake up every day and just write to write. I only write with purpose.

Talking about how I might write the next book is like talking about whether or not to have sex. Any dithering ruins it.

I fantasised about becoming an author and wrote my first book at 18 - an introspective novel set in the 1920s.

I abandoned my second novel completely. Writing 'Kavalier & Clay,' I had several moments of utter collapse. Same with 'The Yiddish Policemen's Union.'

I spent six years after my first novel and five years after my second without getting into a new book.

I had always secretly wanted to write a novel.

I haven't read a book in a very, very long time because, when I'm writing, I don't like to see other people's work. I don't want to see something great and not be able to use it, and I don't want to have any subconscious influences.

'Blood Meridian' was without question the novel that made me want to become a writer.

In a way, I started 'Goon Squad' not even realizing I was writing a book. I thought I was just writing a few stories to stall before starting this other book that I wanted to write - or thought I wanted to write: I still haven't written it.

The book that first made me want to be a writer is Flannery O'Connor's short story collection 'A Good Man Is Hard To Find.'

I've only had four ideas for a novel in my life, and I've written all of them.

I think what happens is that some writers, who are so great in television or whatever, once they become successful, they get out of the loop of real life. It's real hard to draw on something to write.

If a writer is good at what he does, it's not easy to do a good job every day... To invent something new is almost an impossible task.

Sometimes, if I don't write for a day or two, I get backed up - it's like constipation.

I won't write a book. I haven't got a magnum opus in me.

I graduated from college December of 2017 and looking ahead and thinking about potentially starting a book, I just kept getting hung up before even starting because I didn't want to write a book that only people that have served in the military or that have been to combat could understand.

If I had to write a novel, I'd start crying after three lines.

The problem with most of the want-to-be authors is that they are unable to focus. Either they have no idea of where to begin, or they have hundreds of ideas and don't know which one to pick. Both scenarios leading to one result... they give up even before they start.