Guy Johnson 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.

I wasn't sitting around years ago thinking, 'I really want to write a novel.'

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.

Everyone thinks they're going to write one book of poems or one novel.

I was always a keen reader. I jotted down one or two things, but it never occurred to me to think of a job in writing. I thought that writers were like demi-gods. I don't know what I thought.

I wanted to write a novel. At 12 I knew, I am a writer. I said it to nobody.

I was reading a lot of books I admired, and thought that I would like to write something like that someday.

If you think about becoming a writer, that's just really one of the big dreams I had. It's really important to have those dreams and pursue your passions.

I think very visually, and I just never thought I had a novel in me.

It is my desire to be a great writer. I know that I still have a mountain to climb to achieve that.

In my brief writing life, it means I am still lucky that I have at least one more novel to complete. I do not expect that a story will arrive just because it is time to write another novel. It doesn't happen that way.

I'm remembering one book that I wrote, 'Fourth Grade Rats,' that took a month to write, but most of them, full-length novels, I would say about a year.

I thought I was a pretty good writer, but I didn't have anything to write about. I wanted to go out in the world, have some adventures and then write about them.

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.

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

Screenplays I didn't really care about, journalism, travel books, getting my writer friends to write about their dreams or something. I just determined to write the books I had to write.

I think when you first start out, you're writing books that are about your immediate place.

I don't think I knew I would be a writer. I wanted to become a writer, and I tried to write.

Writing was not a childhood dream of mine. I do not recall longing to write as a student. I wasn't sure how to start.

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

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

I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.

Writers always say, 'I always knew I wanted to be a writer; when I was a three-month-old foetus a pen formed in my hand and I began to scratch my first story on the inside of my mother's womb.' I started later, in my early twenties.

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.