Joe Abercrombie Quotes

I wrote my first novel, 'Deadline,' in 1994 as an experiment.

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

My first five novels were written longhand. So were hosts of short stories.

Writers tend to write stories as a kind of holiday between novels, or as preliminary steps towards a novel. Stories just don't often make up a writer's main body of work, and that's not because they don't see the market for it.

I studied the short story as part of my creative writing course at university but then set off as a novelist. Generally, there is a sense that even if you want to write short stories, you need to do a novel first.

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

I wrote for 10 years before I even started the 'Percy Jackson' series.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

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

I had a few stories and longer pieces published, but my first proper novel came in 2003, called 'Dead I Well May Be.'

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

What surprised me most while writing 'The Monogram Murders' was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it.

Well, to be honest I think I'm a better short story writer than a novelist. Novels I find very hard, hours and hours, weeks and weeks, of conscious thought - whereas short stories slip out painlessly in a few days.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

Writing is a lot of fun for me; that's not to say it's easy, but I really do enjoy it.

The first book I sat down to write was an historical romance. It was really bad and thankfully no one ever saw it.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

To make it interesting and worth doing, writing a novel has to be a leap into the unknown. I have to be unsure if I can write it; otherwise, I won't want to.

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.

The experience of writing 'The Kite Runner' is one I will always think back on with fondness. There is an energy, a romance in writing the first novel that can never be duplicated again.

Everyone said, 'Well, you're very old for a first novel,' and I said, 'How do you write when you haven't lived? How do you write when you have no experience? How do you write straight out of university?'

I think most fiction writers naturally start by writing short stories, but some of us don't. When I first started writing, I just started writing a novel. It's a hard way to learn to write. I don't recommend it to my students, but it just happens that way for some of us.

I envy those writers who outline their novels, who know where they're going. But I find writing is a process of discovery.

'John Henry Days' was already half in the can before my first book came out, so I'd already started something that was big and sprawling - I just had to finish it.

I'd been writing fiction for 50 years, since I was 19. And when you write fiction, it becomes a way of thinking: there's always a novel around. The strange thing was that after 'Remember Me,' there wasn't.