Anne Rice Quotes

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

I write very, very slowly, and for me, I have to summon all sorts of resources to make one of these pieces work.

For a writer, children make life needlessly hard. I've muddled through a lot of things, but I have not muddled through my writing life. I work absolutely flat out, giving it my all.

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.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.

Any writer worth the name is always getting into one thing or getting out of another thing.

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

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.

With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult if I'm not sure where the story is going.

For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen.

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 keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

It's easier to come up with new stories than it is to finish the ones you already have. I think every author would feel that way.

I don't usually think of my writing as a 'challenge' because I enjoy the process so much. I suppose that's what's helped me to avoid 'writer's block' all these years.

I'm not the most prolific writer in the world, and, sadly, writing a novel involves a lot of effort.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

There may well be writers who roll up their sleeves and say, 'I'm going to write a post-9/11 novel' but I wasn't one of those.

I often meet frustrated young writers who say they've only got so far and just can't finish a book. Even if you don't happen to use what you've worked on that day, it has taught you something and you'll be amazed when you might come back to it and use it again.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

Writing never comes easy. The difference between Page 2 and Page Nothing is the difference between life and death.

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

Writing a book is an emotional odyssey, sometimes exhilarating, other times deflating.