Ian Rankin Quotes

Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

You know that feeling when you finish a final exam and you think, 'I never want to do that again'? Well I have the same feeling when I finish a novel. Each time I say, 'I think I may retire now' and then after six months the ideas start to churn again. I could never stop.

I didn't do any writing seriously until I was in my mid-twenties. But I've never really thought of myself as doing anything else. I've always wanted to write.

For the last 15 years that I have been performing, all I ever wanted to do was transcend poetry to the world. See, it wasn't enough for me to write a book. It wasn't enough for me to join a slam competition, and while those things hold weight, it wasn't the driving force that pushes the pen to the pad.

I want to create a thousand paintings, maybe two thousand paintings, as many as I can draw.

That's the motivation of an artist - to seek attention of some kind.

I wanted to write.

This image of wanting to be an artist - that I would in some way become an artist -was very strong. I knew for a long, long time that that's what I would be. But nothing I ever did seemed to bring me any nearer to the condition of being an artist. And I didn't know how to do it.

You cannot predict literary success; the only way you can possibly aim for it is to do your thing and do it well.

I've spent my life pursing excellence as an artist, which is what I always wanted to do anyhow.

Gradually I find that my whole soul is merging itself into this business of writing, and especially of writing poetry. I am going to try it; and am going to test, in the most rigid way I know, the awful question whether it is my vocation.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

When I got into art school, I thought it was paradise. I wanted to be an artist so much that I was really driven and nothing could stop me.

I never wanted to be anything but a writer, and I never let go of it.

In my drive to be the perfect artist, I've left a lot of living to the side.

I stopped being an engaged journalist and became a disengaged novelist.

I still write the occasional short story, and poked at a novel once, but it's just not what I want to do.

The basic challenge of any book is you know you're going to be working on it for three or four years or more. So you want to have a subject that will keep you engaged.

Understand, I had absolutely no interest in writing; I wanted to be a Writer.

Even as a kid in drawing class, I had real ambition. I wanted to be the best in the class, but there was always some other feller who was better; so I thought, 'It can't be about being the best, it has to be about the drawing itself, what you do with it.' That's kind of stuck with me.

I started a novel right before 'The Imitation Game,' so it's funny now, four years later, to be coming almost back to finishing it.

Sometimes I ask myself if writing novels is even respectable.

I write about what haunts me, and I write the books I myself am dying to read. I love it. I can't think of anything I'd rather do.

As an artist, you're always going to be yearning and wanting and never satisfied. I never feel like I've really achieved something.

By 2013, at the age of 29, I was failing. I had left two good jobs in succession to complete a novel I'd been tooling around with since 2009, had enrolled in a graduate programme in Texas, as far away from home as possible, to finish it - and yet: what did I have to show for it after five years of work?