David B. Coe Quotes

I'm a novelist at heart. How's that? And that's how I make my living, is I write novels.

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

I'm a professional. So before I published any novels, I'd always been writing stories.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

Ironically, writing a novel is not a way to sort out your confusion.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

Books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.

Writing is my number one passion. I've written two novels. I've written a screenplay. I also write short stories and poetry.

The most common human act that writing a novel resembles is lying. The working novelist lies daily, very complexly, and at great length.

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

I do write a lot of prose. It's not disciplined enough yet that it's actually become stories, or short stories. The idea of writing a novel seems impossible.

I'm writing books. They're still a mix of fact and fiction and will continue to be. I think it's an interesting place to work.

You may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.

Writing a book is the most terrifying thing that I've ever done. It's so much harder than writing for television because it is a completely different skill set.

Writing a novel proved to be the hardest, most self-analyzing task I had ever attempted, far worse than an autobiography: and its rewards were greater than I expected.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

Writing a short story is like having a short intense affair, whereas writing a novel is like a long rich marriage.

The writing of a novel is taking life as it already exists, not to report it but to make an object, toward the end that the finished work might contain this life inside it and offer it to the reader. The essence will not be, of course, the same thing as the raw material; it is not even of the same family of things. The novel is something that never was before and will not be again.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.

Never, if you can possibly help it, write a novel. It is, in the first place, a thoroughly unsocial act. It makes one obnoxious to one's family and to one's friends. One sits about for many weeks, months, even years, in the worst cases, in a state of stupefaction.