Harlan Ellison Quotes

Aside from the Rizzoli & Isles books, there are many other stories I want to write. The question is whether I'll live long enough to write them all!

Of course I planned to write the Great American Novel; that lasted about a week, at which point I decided I had nothing to say that could possibly qualify. So I wrote a romance instead.

What is useful about when there is a sort of pull-out to reveal moment going on is that it actually focuses the mind when you're writing the earlier scenes because you're thinking 'right, how do I? I can only show this amount of the room... I can only show these characters from the waist up because they've all got robot legs!' it's a challenge so it keeps you engaged on some level.

I had the notion that I wanted to write the great dirty American novel, so I went to Roanoke College on the GI Bill.

That freedom of writing you don't get in other formats, I'd rather leave it to someone else to deal with the headache of drafting my book into a screenplay.

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.

I was a math whiz who stunk at English, so of course I wanted to be a writer more than anything in the world. I performed impromptu plays for my grandmother's sewing circle but forced my little sister to ask for ketchup at McDonald's.

Writing was something I always as a kid thought would be fabulous and glamorous to be a writer.

Being a novelist is hard for anyone - male or female. You don't get to quit your day job.

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.

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.

When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about.

I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.

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

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

I always envision myself being a Hemingway type.

It's really hard to be a story writer - no matter how much acclaim you get - and not write a novel.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

I've been writing since I was six years old. It's hard to imagine stopping. I would hate to think that I've already written my best book.

I believe when you're writing film or television, you can't rely on a crutch or rule that exists outside of the narrative of the film.

A man who is not born with the novel-writing gift has a troublesome time of it when he tries to build a novel. I know this from experience. He has no clear idea of his story; in fact he has no story. He merely has some people in his mind, and an incident or two, also a locality, and he trusts he can plunge those people into those incidents with interesting results.

It took time to learn that the hard thing about writing is to let the story write itself, while one sits at the typewriter and does as little thinking as possible. It happened over and over again, and the beginner learned - when you start puzzling over an idea, and slowing down on the keys, the writing gets worse and worse.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

I definitely want to write some fiction, for sure. I already have half of the next book. I already have it all mapped out. I'm ready. I'm ready to bring it to the world.

When you write a story, you’re telling yourself the story,” he said. “When you rewrite, your main job is taking out all the things that are not the story.