Tess Gerritsen Quotes

My books start almost before I realise it. Once in a while, some accident causes an idea to rise to the surface and say: 'now.'

You never know how - or when - the idea for a book will appear.

Suddenly, the idea of writing a book was like coming home. I didn't tell anyone except my wife, Clare. I just began.

I definitely thought I was going to write books. I wrote a couple of children's books when I was like 11 when I was a child myself!

My son had toyed with the idea of writing and trying to write a little bit, so that kind of gave me the bug to write also.

I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

As an author, I've never forgotten how to daydream.

The process of writing a novel begins with a pang, a moment of recognition, and a situation, a character, or something you read in a paper, that seems to go off, like a solar flare inside your head.

I was swimming in my swimming pool when 'The Secret Lovers' popped entire into my head. I got out, dried off, went upstairs, and finished the book in about 50 days.

I hadn't ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six months before I started work on 'Elsewhere' that I would never write a novel.

Literature for me isn't a workaday job, but something which involves desires, dreams and fantasy.

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking, 'I really want to write a novel.'

I get suggestions all the time. People feel quite free at events or even on the street to tell me what they think I should be writing. What I've learned, though, is that this thing, this connection, has to be in place for me to be able to kind of launch into a world imaginatively.

Normally book ideas come to me in a moment.

I used to read about people who'd say, 'I dream my books, and then I write them down.' And I was like, 'Oh, please.'

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.

I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.

I started writing while I was a little boy. Maybe it's because I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday. Also, my love for good writing pushed me.

I didn't know anything about writers. It never occurred to me they were regular people and that I could grow up to become one, even though I loved to make up stories inside my head.

I write poetry anyway and have for years and years. For me, putting fiction and poetry together is like the best of both worlds.

I just write the books that I think I would want to read.

Love is the answer to everything. It's the only reason to do anything. If you don't write stories you love, you'll never make it. If you don't write stories that other people love, you'll never make it.

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.

What's funny about that is when I was writing Twilight just for myself and not thinking of it as a book, I was not thinking about publishing, and yet at the same time I was casting it in my head. Because when I read books, I see them very visually.