Wilbur Smith Quotes

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

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

I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

I always knew writing a novel was a great thing.

It seems to me in the past it's been a good thing, as a writer, to have experiences I hadn't expected.

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.

For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Jigsaw Lady is the working title of a science fiction novel I've had in my head for darn near 15 years. I think I'll start work on it next year (in all my spare time) but I'd like to get it finished some day.

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.

The good thing about writing a novel is that you're creating an imaginary world and can take a break when you need to.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

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.

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.

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.

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?'

The best novel I wrote was one called 'Crusoe's Daughter,' which never won any prizes. But I was getting somewhere in that. I'm not sure I have in any of the others.

My first novel, 'The Lions of Lucerne,' just poured out of me. It was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. My biggest fear and therefore my biggest obstacle to becoming an author had been, 'What if I spend all that time and the book is no good?'

I attempt to write a good novel. Whether it is literature or not is something that will be decided by the ages, not by me and not by a pack of critics around the globe.

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.

I did try to write fiction. I wrote 10 novels. And they were all just awful.

I couldn't have been the novelist I was without being the journalist I was.

Just as readers often turn into writers, novel-writers often become novel-reviewers.

I've had great writing teachers and mentors and great success with my first book.

There were many times in my initial days as a writer when I had felt the need to talk to someone, to leverage on someone's experience, to learn from someone who had written and published a book.