Linwood Barclay Quotes

I know that I'm probably far more pedestrian and less talented than many who dreamed of becoming writers but couldn't see the road so easily.

I could never have pictured myself writing a book when I was 25 years old. My mom was an English teacher but I wasn't that way growing up.

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!

I don't reckon there are many writers who start out really expecting writing to be an attainable occupation. Well, I didn't. It was a pipe dream.

I set out to write a screenplay but, since my early 20s, had dreamed of writing a novel.

Like so many aspiring writers who still have boxes of things they've written in their parents' houses, I filled notebooks with half-finished poems and stories and first paragraphs of novels that never got written.

Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.

I wrote my first book at 20, but my whole focus from about the age of 12 was to be a writer.

When I was a kid and wanted to grow up to be a writer, I assumed I would be writing about animals and children because that's what I cared about and read about. But I never did.

I hadn't ever felt any particular calling to be a novelist, and I clearly remember telling a friend of mine about six months before I started work on 'Elsewhere' that I would never write a novel.

Writing is possibly an art, but crime writing is definitely a craft.

Had I not become entangled with music, I would have become an author much earlier.

'Baker Towers' is the book I've always known I would write, but it wasn't an easy book to do.

You don't say, I'm going to be a writer when I grow up - at least I didn't.

And sometimes I sit down to write, because that is what I like to do more and more in the future.

At Marvel, I was lucky enough to work with really talented people, but I always had this nagging thought: 'One day I'll write my own stories.'

I can never tell ahead of time which book will give me trouble - some balk every step of the way, others seem to write themselves - but certainly the mechanics of writing, finding the time and the psychic space, are easier now that my children are grown.

My crime novels are highly structured. I never start out with a dead body. I start with an impossible scenario. Opening questions should be mysterious, weird, intriguing, and contain the seeds of the solution. The structure has to be meticulous - I'm a structure freak.

My first novel, 'The Lions of Lucerne,' just poured out of me. It was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. My biggest fear and therefore my biggest obstacle to becoming an author had been, 'What if I spend all that time and the book is no good?'

Each novel is harder than its predecessor because I must work harder at not repeating myself. However, I enjoy the challenge. This is the greatest job in the world.

With this first novel, I am just above the foothills, but I see the path to the top, and it is my desire to write compelling stories about everything that I find of interest.

I don't think many of us launched ourselves into the world of writing books fully formed.

I don't usually think of my writing as a 'challenge' because I enjoy the process so much. I suppose that's what's helped me to avoid 'writer's block' all these years.

Someday I would like to be the kind of writer who barrels through a draft, but I can't even seem to barrel through an interview like this, so I imagine I have a long way to go.

I had wanted to write Ghost Country for a long time, but it wouldn't work.