Jane Gardam Quotes

I really absolutely loved writing my first book.

I didn't think I could pull off a novel.

I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.

I've never abandoned the novel.

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

When I wrote The Onion Field, I realized that my first two novels were just practice.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

I'm just going to write the best books I can.

Sometime early in life, I developed the notion - one which I have never relinquished - that writing a novel is the very finest thing a person can do.

I was definitely meant to be a young adult author, and I love it - I'm here to stay!

Everyone has early fiction fantasies, but it wasn't until my second child Betsy was born that I allowed the urge to write a novel bubble up.

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.

Listen, I wrote 10 unsuccessful books before I broke through, so I'm looking all the time to keep my books fascinating. I want to write what people want to read, not push any message.

I never thought my ideas would actually get published.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I thought I could write. So it was my intention to start off as a writer. But I wasn't really great at delivering the word at the end of the day.

I've written a lot of books now; I've been published for over 30 years. I hope with every book I learn something new, and with every new novel I try to improve the process of writing.

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.

The only way to be a novelist, to think that you can create something others will give themselves up to for a dozen hours or more, is to have psychotic self-belief.

I've been writing stories since I was 12. 'Writer's Digest' was one of my writing teachers, actually.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

The story wrote quickly. I called it 'Where You're From,' and I sent it out, as I had numerous other stories over the years. Except this time I got a letter back saying that it would be published. Someone out there had liked the story. I was thirty-one years old.

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.

One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.