Alison McGhee Quotes

If I could get someone like John Grisham or someone like that to sit down and write a book with me, I'd love that.

We'd decided to write a book about two friends. I gave her some coffee and then we sat there not knowing what to do. How do you start writing a book together? So Kate [DiCamillo] got up after about 10 minutes into this endeavor, and said, 'Well, that was fun,' and started to head out the door. I said, 'Wait, wait, wait, no no no,' because I'm a bit more patient.

I don't think we [with Kate DiCamillo] intended to write a book about friendship, I think we intended to write a book about two friends.

Our rule was that we [with Kate DiCamillo] would write everything together, literally every word.

In 2011, I announced that I was going to retire, and my agent panicked. So she says: No, no, no. You have to write a book with your husband.

I like sitting and writing with my buddies.

I share an office with Jason Sudeikis, and I'm friends with him, so I end up writing for him a lot.

That first writing session, what Dan Hill calls a creative blind date, is always a real challenge, and you bring that back to your partner when you return to writing with them.

Well, unlike a lot of authors, I will be the one to cop to having a ghostwriter. I've always written with someone else.

I rarely write by myself.

I do not so much write a book as sit up with it, as a dying friend. I hold its hand and hope it will get better.

Every morning for, I don't know how long, I came over to Alison's [McGhee] house and we sat in her office and wrote the stories "out loud" together. We yelled at each other and made each other laugh. It was a lot of fun.

Alice and I, we'd met before, but we were able to kind of sit and chat on the set of Dark Shadows, and talk about maybe writing some songs together. We started doing that, and then one thing led to another and it became this Vampire project - because he was telling stories about all those days, which were fascinating.

We are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

A lot of my close friends had tolerantly washed their hands of the whole idea of me writing a book. They had said to themselves, "I don't know what he's doing."

It is no fun at all to have been writing a book for seven or so years, especially when you've never published anything before.

I'll work by myself for years and then I'll think it'll be fun to et one of my friends like Marshall Brickman or Doug McGrath into a room and not be alone for the writing of the thing; to have the pleasure of taking walks and get lunch together; its sort of a fun process and then I do it and then I get back on my own for a while until I feel the need to do it again.

I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

As much fun as it is to read a book, writing a book is one level deeper than that.

Following takes why. Transactions take what. It has to be real. It has to be the same for writing a book.

The process of book writing for me is entirely one of trial and error.

I think the book you always like best is the one you're about to write.

The books are always there, just the way you wrote them. The plays often don't turn out the way you wanted them to because in the theater, you're always involved with collaborators and they don't always see the work the way you do.

When I am so intensely involved with writing my books I don't like to reread them.

I like having people with me to lean on and write with and have fun with.