Stephen Graham Jones Quotes

I'm a great believer in gathering together all your obsessions and seeing if you can make a novel out of them.

Don't keep rewriting and polishing something if it isn't setting the world on fire: start something new instead and consider the earlier story a learning experience.

I write all the time and I try to think of ideas all the time.

My prescription for writer's block is to face the fact that there is no such thing.... Writing well is difficult, but one can always write something. And then, with a lot of work, make it better. It's a question of having enough will and ambition, not of hoping to evade this mysterious hysteria people are always talking about.

And once I know what the first page is, then the rest will come.

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

For me, it would be pointless to write a novel that I knew I could complete within a specific length of time. I could do that only by repeating something I had done before, and I've never wanted to do that.

Weirdly, often the more I write, the more ideas I have.

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

I liked to write from the time I was about 12 or 13. I loved to read. And since I only spoke to my brother, I would write down my thoughts. And I think I wrote some of the worst poetry west of the Rockies. But by the time I was in my 20s, I found myself writing little essays and more poetry - writing at writing.

I don't even subscribe to writer's block being a truthful thing. I've had writer's laziness quite often. But I think it's all about sitting down and facing down the blank page and doing it, and I've always been ok at that.

The way you get better is putting words on the page and getting them behind you.

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

Before you can write a novel you have to have a number of ideas that come together. One idea is not enough.

I like all kinds of stories, and I usually work on several stories at once. When I run out of gas on one, I start work on the other.

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

If you're going to write a good book, you have to make mistakes and you have to not be so cautious all the time.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

If the novelist isn't surprised by where his book ends up, he or she probably hasn't written anything worth remembering.

I'm a fictional monogamist - I can only work on one thing at a time - but each novel starts growing in my head when I'm about midway through the previous novel.

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.

Anybody could write a bad script, and I'm one of them, you know?

And, of course, there were some times when I had writer's block and I had a hard time figuring out how to express what I wanted to express.

I know some writers that have a million novel ideas, but I don't.