Neel Mukherjee Quotes

Writing's still the most difficult job I've ever had - but it's worth it.

'Baker Towers' is the book I've always known I would write, but it wasn't an easy book to do.

Writing never comes easy. The difference between Page 2 and Page Nothing is the difference between life and death.

The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.

I had no idea how complicated and solitary it could be to write a simple book.

For me, writing never gets easier. It's always hard work. It doesn't matter how many words you wrote the day before, or how many novels you've completed in the last decade: every day you start fresh again with that same blank page, or that same blank screen.

A writer is somebody for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

The great thing about being a writer is that you have a long, perhaps frighteningly long time in which to do your work.

I think if I've worked anything through with screenwriting it's that I'm not going to be able to work anything through.

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.

Each morning my characters greet me with misty faces willing, though chilled, to muster for another day's progress through the dazzling quicksand the marsh of blank paper.

It's easier to come up with new stories than it is to finish the ones you already have. I think every author would feel that way.

Stories are hard. I have friends who knock out stories on a weekly or monthly basis, like they're running on medicinal-strength Updike. But for me a story is as daunting a prospect as a novel.

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

My entry into screenwriting was not smooth.

I know there are writers who like to say that every novel is hard, and it doesn't get easier. That may be the case, and I've only written two. But the first, to me, was characterized by an enduring oscillation between perseverance and a profound doubt.

Writing a book is an emotional odyssey, sometimes exhilarating, other times deflating.

'The Rose Society' was definitely the hardest book I've ever written, because it's so difficult to stay in that dark space.

The process of writing a book has given me a whole new reverence for writers. Mechanically, it is a brutal process; emotionally, it's incredibly healing.

I don't know any writer for whom it comes easily. Maybe John Updike - a story would just seem to come to him whole, you know, out of a personal experience. But the rest of us, I think, are not so lucky, and I had to work hard, yeah.

I think, as a writer, you spend most of your time working on the book alone.

I said to Ruth Rendell, 'When you've written as many books as you have, it's easier.' She said, 'No dear, it gets harder'.

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 profession of the writer has its thorns about which the reader does not dream.

The first series I wrote, 'L.A. Candy,' was always meant to be a three-book series, so when I started out it was all outlined that way and by the time I was done with the third book, I had become so involved and the process and the stories, I was a little bit sad to be done.