Sidney Sheldon Quotes

I started writing because I wanted to write scripts, but I wasn't very good at it. Then I started writing short stories, sort of as treatments for the film scripts, and I found I enjoyed writing short stories far more than I enjoyed writing film scripts. Then the short stories got longer and longer and suddenly, I had novels.

Screenwriting is a much more collaborative effort. When you write a novel, it's just you, with input from your editor.

I think I would like to write screenplays, books, really anything.

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

The story and the characters of 'Girl Online' are mine.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

I stopped writing short fiction early on - I was never really good at it, and I never liked the results. So I stopped trying to fit the material I was working with into these tidy little short fiction packages.

One of the more depressing things about reading your fiction 25 years later, or 10 years later, is you realize the only things going on are things you made go on. Strange and interesting and new and wonderful things don't happen. It's the book you wrote; that's all.

I've tried very hard and I've never found any resemblance between the people I know and the people in my novels.

The short story, it's not a step on the way to becoming a novelist.

I had been a reporter for 15 years when I set out to write my first novel. I knew how to research an article or profile a subject - skills that I assumed would be useless when it came to fiction. It was from my imagination that the characters in my story would emerge.

Every novel generates its own climate, when you get going.

I wrote four novels under the name Amy Silver. The first one was commissioned, and I was given basically the whole plot and the characters. They told me what to do, and I went straight away and did it. After that, I continued, and I was coming up with more my own ideas, although they did steer me.

I'm not one of those authors who claims to hear voices in my head or 'let the characters speak through me,' whatever that might mean.

Novel-writing is, for the novelist, a game of let's pretend.

When I write something, I can't remember in the end if this is a memory or if it's not - I'm talking about fiction. So for me, it's the same thing.

The things that I'm interested in directing are fiction, because then you're not married to a particular reality.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

When I'm writing, it's about the page. It's not about the movie. It's not about cinema. It's about the literature of me putting my pen to paper and writing a good page and making it work completely as a document unto itself. That's my first artistic contribution. If I do my job right, by the end of the script, I should be having the thought, 'You know, if I were to just publish this now and not make it . . . I'm done.

I have no problems or issues with screenwriting in general.

When you write for a show that's not yours, your job is to hear the voices of the characters and write as best you can for those voices.

When I'm the one who sits down and looks at the blank page and writes it out all the way, then I'll call it my script.

My fictitious characters will take the bit between their teeth and gallop off and do something that I hadn't counted on. However, I always insist on dragging them back to the straight and narrow.

I can't do a film if I don't start with the writing.

When I wrote my first book, 'The Tennis Party', my overriding concern was that I didn't write the autobiographical first novel. I was so, so determined not to write about a 24-year-old journalist. It was going to have male characters, and middle-aged people, so I could say, 'Look, I'm not just writing about my life, I'm a real author.'