Celeste Ng Quotes

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.

If I had to give young writers advice, I would say don't listen to writers talking about writing or themselves.

It's way easier to write for other people. Yourself isn't in it. When you write for yourself, you overthink, and you become paranoid. When you write for others, it isn't about you.

It was my great problem to solve: how to write a book, you know. And after you write one, you have to write another to prove to yourself you can do it again.

There was a terrible fear for me when I started writing, which was that if you'd been denied unbelievably tumultuous experience, you didn't have permission to write.

It's my belief that I was a writer - a very hardworking writer - well before I was published. I did care what others thought, and it was embarrassing when people asked me what I had published, so I didn't talk much about writing; rather, I just kept writing.

Until a book starts forming in your head, you always wonder, 'Am I going to be able to do this again?'

I have to make myself write, sometimes. In the space between poems, you somehow forget how to do it, where to begin. It was good to be task - based for a while. I just came downstairs each day, picked the one I was going to do that day, and wrote.

My writing is progressing slowly, but at least it's moving forward. I'm sure that's the case. The only problem is that I'm never absolutely certain that what I've written is any good.

Every writer knows that unless you were born gifted with either supreme confidence or outsize ego, handing in your work holds, in some cases, admitted terror. If that's too strong, at least fairly high anxiety.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

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

I thought I could write. So it was my intention to start off as a writer. But I wasn't really great at delivering the word at the end of the day.

One of the big breakthroughs I had as a writer was when I stopped agonising over every word.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

When it comes time to sit down and write the next book, you're deathly afraid that you're not up to the task. That was certainly the case with me after Snow Falling on Cedars.

It's hard for me to just practice without writing something.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

Don't force yourself to write. Some people can write a novel in a few months, whereas for others it can take over a year. I'm lucky to be one of the former - but, even so, if I'm not in the mood to write, I won't. I'll go off, do something else and come back to it when I'm ready.

One of the problems of writing is that anyone who commits themselves to that process has to believe that they're good.

When I sit at that typewriter, I have to be frightened of what I'm trying to do. I'm frightened by my own belief that I can actually get a story down on paper.

You are always working on your worst book and your best book at the same time. The praise does not make you write better, and it shouldn't make you write worse, either.

My main piece of advice would be don't worry about being published - just write a really good book, but also don't be afraid to write a bad book. Give yourself permission to fail, and don't be afraid.