Gunter Grass Quotes

It depends on the book and what else is going on during my life, but it usually takes me about six months to write and revise the first draft.

When I started working on 'Stay With Me,' I thought it would take two years to complete the novel.

There's a lot of ignorance about how long it takes to write a novel. There's a lot of ignorance about how long a novel is in your head before you start to write it.

Actually, I enjoy the process of writing a big long novel.

Here's the secret to finishing that first book. Don't rewrite as you go.

If you're having trouble finishing a book, it might be that you're trying to fix it as you go. Just finish the story, no matter how terrible you think that first draft is. Then let it cool off. In other words, don't look at it for a while. Then you can rewrite it.

Sometimes some of these little side excursions are useful and I manage to fit them in the book somewhere.

You can't write anything you want. Once you write that first chapter, then everything else is determined. You can write anything you want, but only one thing works.

I am a very linear thinker, so I write beginning to end. I write hundreds of pages per book that never make it into print.

Writing a first novel was an arduous crash course. I learned so much in the six years it took me to write it, mostly technical things pertaining to craft.

Writing novels is sitting in a room by yourself for a year.

I've never written a novel before, and part of the reason I haven't is I was worried about getting 50,000 words into a book and realizing I'd made a mistake on word three that would mean throwing everything out.

Writing books takes a long time, and one thing a writer must do is learn to live with his or her project.

I don't know how everyone writes a novel; that sounds exhausting.

I want to wake up one morning and know how to write page one, or page 10, or page 250. But I never seem to know how to do it. Every book is different and takes a different structure, style, process, etc. And relearning how to write is where the insanity comes from.

I found some time ago that I have to be careful, while working on a novel, what I read.

It makes more sense to write one big book - a novel or nonfiction narrative - than to write many stories or essays. Into a long, ambitious project you can fit or pour all you possess and learn.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

Usually I'll write all the way through to an end, and then I go back and try to fix the ending so that it makes sense. I don't think out the plot ahead of time.

Writing doesn't come real easy to me. I couldn't write a novel in a year. It wouldn't be readable. I don't let an editor even look at it until the second year, because it would just scare them. I just have to trust that all these scraps and dead-ends will find a way.

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

I was twenty-seven when I came up with the idea for my first novel.

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

I'm working on a new novel, in its 3rd draft, but it's hard to write while doing 7th Heaven.