Patrick Rothfuss Quotes

I've never actually even contemplated writing a book or having a book.

I had already drafted the manuscript that would become my first book by the time I graduated from college, but I had no idea what to do with it.

It generally takes me about nine months from the point the book is conceived to the point my editor sends it off to be typeset.

Let your poem be kept nine years.

Only by declaring a book completely finished can one start to see how much remains to be done on it.

If a great thing can be done, it can be done easily, but this ease is like the of ease of a tree blossoming after long years of gathering strength.

The advice I would offer to any writer is that even when you think you have revised your book to the point where you cannot look at it again, it is time to sit down and revise it some more.

I'm hoping to get started on a new novel.

No book I publish will be perfect, but I need to feel I've taken it as far as I can.

I really appreciate what it takes to create a book. I understand the loneliness that it involves and the excitement and the vulnerability: I especially identify with that.

The best way to learn to write is to read in the genre you might be interested in; then, you need to actually sit down and write. In a lot of cases, the first book you write will not get published. Do not get hung up on that. Start a second book.

Writing books takes a long time, and one thing a writer must do is learn to live with his or her project.

Everything I write goes through a lot of drafts. A hundred rewrites is not unusual for me to go through - the last fifty maybe just going back and forth on a single line or word selection.

I'm glad I didn't get to WWE until I did because I was more complete at 32 than I was at 25. It all happens for a reason.

I'd done occasional short stories, but I don't like publishing them in literary magazines; they treat you too much like college boys.

I never thought that it would take me so long to do something. I thought everything was temporary and sometimes the best thing you have working in your favor is a bad sense of time. In order to sit down and write a book that takes six years you have to have a screwed up sense of time because that's too daunting. No one is going to pick up a pen and a piece of paper and say, "Okay, six years, here we go."

I work on one page, revising and polishing until I can't make it better, then move on to the next. Some pages might get 20 or more drafts before I move on.

The Great Vessel takes long to complete.

I've written books that have taken me fifteen years, from first sentence to last, and some that only take three or four months.

You’ll learn that the key to a great book is editing-grindin g, buffing, and polishing-not writing.

With the possible exception of God during the writing of the Bible, every writer in history has needed an editor. So do you.

"The Diagnosis" had ten drafts of very significant changing, where I went through the whole book, wholesale and changed everything. Then the last year or so it was making small changes. I would do something and let it sit for three months... just brood about and decide I needed to slightly change something here or there. Or one character wasn't quite right. But I think everybody goes through this.

Nations are not formed in a day, the formation requires years.

I can’t write five words but that I change seven.

Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.