A. N. Wilson Quotes

Never, ever become a writer. It's a nightmare.

Being a writer is like having homework every night for the rest of your life.

The great thing about being a writer is that you have a long, perhaps frighteningly long time in which to do your work.

I love writing and do not know why it is considered such a difficult, agonizing profession.

I've always been a writer. I hope to continue to write books until I can't anymore.

At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.

When I decided I wanted to become an author, I never thought something I wrote would be used as a way to start conversations that are otherwise difficult to begin.

I don't know if I want to be a writer.

My whole life, I've wanted to be a novelist.

Occasionally it does hit me, the words on a page. And I still love doing that, as I have for the last 60 years.

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

Read everything. Write all the time. And if you can do anything else that gives you equal pleasure and allows you to sleep soundly at night, do that instead. The writing life is an odd one, to say the least.

Writing a book is a long and difficult process for me. I'm a slow writer, so I spend the year with Elvis Cole and Joe Pike in my head. I was thinking about this the other day. I wrote the first book in 1987. Literally every day since that time, Elvis and Joe have been in my head. They're always there. I started these guys because I like them.

Perhaps it would be better not to be a writer, but if you must, then write.

I was definitely meant to be a young adult author, and I love it - I'm here to stay!

Unfortunately for my family, they have a writer in the family.

I enjoy writing, sometimes; I think that most writers will tell you about the agony of writing more than the joy of writing, but writing is what I was meant to do.

I'm a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.

Somebody said writing is easy, you just sit down at your typewriter and open a vein. It depends on the book. Some, I have to do quite a lot of research, which I like. Others are much closer to me.

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

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

To be honest, the only thing I ever really wanted to be was a writer - since I read 'Charlotte's Web' as a child.

I was very fortunate that my first novel captivated the imaginations of so many readers who asked for a sequel. After that, one book led to another as I discovered other facets to my characters I wanted to investigate further.

For a writer, life is always too short to write. I will just try my best during what remains of my life.