Joseph Wambaugh Quotes

The best novel I wrote was one called 'Crusoe's Daughter,' which never won any prizes. But I was getting somewhere in that. I'm not sure I have in any of the others.

I'd never written a novel before, and I wrote a novel, and that turned out OK.

I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.

My first attempt at writing a novel was horrible. I had to throw it away. But I stuck with the idea, which is what became 'The Invisible Circus.'

Hopefully I'm learning a lesson from every new thing I write, whether it features guys in spandex or not.

Writing a novel is one of those modern rites of passage, I think, that lead us from an innocent world of contentment, drunkenness, and good humor, to a state of chronic edginess and the perpetual scanning of bank statements.

The novel, for me, was an accident. I really don't consider myself a novelist.

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.

I was well traveled, and I created this illusion of literacy through reading and writing. I wrote a book of short stories.

I want to have new challenges and write new crazy books because I think it makes me a better writer to be insecure and try new things.

I wrote for 10 years before I even started the 'Percy Jackson' series.

No one knows how to write a novel until it's been written.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

I've written a lot of books now; I've been published for over 30 years. I hope with every book I learn something new, and with every new novel I try to improve the process of writing.

When one starts writing a book, especially a novel, even the humblest person in the world hopes to become Homer.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

Publishing a short story can sometimes feel like shouting into the dark... your words come out, and then nothing... but I don't think that's why I tend to write novels rather than stories.

What surprised me most while writing 'The Monogram Murders' was that everything I needed seemed to arrive in my head exactly when I needed it.

What I wanted in life always was to write something as good as 'Pinocchio.' I wanted to write. I wanted to evolve. I wanted to grow.

I am not much of a researcher as a novelist; I write mainly from experience.

In 25 years of writing novels, I've never had anything that felt like writer's block.

I never know as a writer when I set out into a novel where it's going to take me.

When I am writing a story it feels as real as the life I am experiencing off the page. It's an emotional illusion, I guess.

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

Even though I don't write about things that come from my life because I'm lucky, and I live in a great place with great kids and, you know, a great husband, I think you can find threads of me in the characters, so that's really what being a writer is, probably.