Teju Cole Quotes

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page.

I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

For any writers at all, read everything you can and then put your butt in the chair and write. That's all there is to it.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Some people take 10 years to write a book and some can do one in under a year.

You write, hoping to write a good book; that's it.

I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written 'Just Kids' had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word. To be a writer - this may seem trite, I realize - you have to actually write.

I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.

They're fancy talkers about themselves, writers. If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

The point always is to be writing something - it leads to more writing.

I write about five thousand words a day, when working on a book, about three thousand a day if I'm writing a short story. I take long periods off between projects, when I read a lot, garden, and think about the next book or stories.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

Write. Enjoy writing. Then, and only then, worry about the business end of it. Start loving your hobby, and then you can't go too wrong.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

I'm not a compulsive writer. I wish I could be compulsive about something. I have no regular writing routine.

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.

But the ultimate lesson is just sit down and write. That's all.

When I am occupied with a work that requires continuity - a novel, for example - I write every day.

I write everywhere. I've written books while I was on planes, at Disney World, and in multiple countries of which I am not a native. It can be a struggle to make word count sometimes, but I will persevere!

I've lost track of the number of people who want to be writers but never actually write anything. Talking about writing, dreaming about writing, can be very fun, but it won't get a book written. You've got to write.

If you love something - and there are things that I love - you do want more and more and more of it, but that's not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.