Paula Hawkins Quotes

Write a book you'd like to read. If you wouldn't read it, why would anybody else? Don't write for a perceived audience or market. It may well have vanished by the time your book's ready.

I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.

I write what I write.

The fun thing about song writing is that it's just creative. It can be whatever you want it to be. For me, I'm really protective of that. I'm not going to write something because I feel like it fits here or it fits there - I just want to write music that feels good to me, you know?

I'm writing exactly the kinds of books I like to write. And they're the kinds of books I like to read. They're popular commercial fiction. That's what they are.

I'm such a huge fan of fan fiction, to me it's a great way for readers to become writers. It's like putting the training wheels on for writing.

It is easy to club people together, but there are bound to be influences of authors you've read. I grew up reading fast paced authors such as Sidney Sheldon and Jeffrey Archer, but to say I'm one of them isn't true; my style is intrinsically my own.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

I've never actually directed anything I haven't made up. I've never adapted anything.

I've done a number of things based on real people or true stories or based on books, and I'm a great believer that you have to be true to the script.

When I write a novel, I am God at my own typewriter, and there is nobody in between. But when I write a screenplay, it must be a compromise because there are so many elements which are outside the writer's province.

It doesn't really feel like it's got anything to do with me. I mean, I know I wrote it, and all that and invented the characters and made it up, but it's Mike's film, so doing the press and stuff, it feels a little bit inauthentic. I was just one component of it.

I've always believed in writing without a collaborator, because where two people are writing the same book, each believes he gets all the worry and only half the royalties.

I never really like it when other writers talk about coming in behind people and rewriting.

I'm not a super-actorly actor, my-body-is-an-instrument type of person, but I do want to do fun, exciting, interesting things. I have a 2001 PT Cruiser. I saved my money so I can take my time and choose something that I think is great, and that's what I'm waiting for.

In many ways, it's easier to write a book. You have more latitude with structure, and you have the freedom to luxuriate within the internal lives and musings of your characters. But where a screenplay does not always demand great prose, a novel lives or dies by it.

I actually started writing publishable stuff the day I decided I'd actually like to write something I'd like to read, and stopped trying to think what does everyone actually want.

It may be tripe, but it's my tripe - and I do urge other authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.

Fiction writing is great. You can make up almost anything.

Seeing 'Pretty Little Liars' fans adapt and create their own stories is both exciting and flattering, and I think what Amazon Publishing is offering through Kindle Worlds is a great way to reward their ingenuity.

It is one test of a fully developed writer that he reminds us of no one but himself.

I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true.

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

I like writing my own stuff. If a book came along I would maybe do that.

Writing is much more satisfying on a certain level than acting ever was. Because you're not interpreting someone else's original idea, you can come up with your own.