Philipp Meyer Quotes

Becoming a writer is not a 'career decision' like becoming a doctor or a policeman. You don't choose it so much as get chosen, and once you accept the fact that you're not fit for anything else, you have to be prepared to walk a long, hard road for the rest of your days.

If you don't put 99 percent of yourself into the writing, there will be no publishing career. There's the writer and there's the author. The author - you don't ever think about the author. Just think about the writer. So my advice would be, find a way to not care - easier said than done.

I've figured out in the course of my life that the one thing I'm good at doing is writing books, and it would be crazy to trade that in for something else.

With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born writers, some people achieve it after a lot of hard work, some people have a writing career thrust upon them. I am in that last group.

A one-hundred-thousand-word novel might take a year or several years, and then you just come to 'The End' one day. But it takes hundreds of days to get to 'The End.' As a writer, you have to put in those hundreds of days.

Novelists are stamina merchants, grinders, nine-to-fivers, and their career curves follow the usual arc of human endeavour.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

I started to write when I was eighteen or nineteen. However, until I was about twenty-three, I didn't take it that seriously.

In terms of people who want to be writers, I wish more people knew how much work it was.

Ever since I started writing in college, I have, save for a few short breaks here and there, been working away on something. I love it, I need it, and so it never occurred to me to put writing on the back burner.

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.

Occasionally it does hit me, the words on a page. And I still love doing that, as I have for the last 60 years.

I always knew I wanted to be a writer.

It has taken me years of struggle, hard work and research to learn to make one simple gesture, and I know enough about the art of writing to realize that it would take as many years of concentrated effort to write one simple, beautiful sentence.

I'm not a businessman. I could pack it in, but I like work. I don't want to sound like Catherine Cookson, but I've worked since I was eight, with a paper round and in a fruit and veg shop.

I guess I write four or five hours a day, but I do it seven days a week. It's very disciplined, yes, but it's joy for me.

I save the best of myself for novels, and I believe it shows.

Unfortunately for my family, they have a writer in the family.

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.

I'm not sure if I always wanted to be a writer, but I was always writing.

I like the idea of being a working writer, not of saying that it's going to take me 30 years to write my magnum opus.

It's a job. When I'm writing I'm going to do it five to six days a week and I'm going to work for four to six hours a day. There's no magic writing fairy. It's just hard work.

As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that's a disguise for being a writer.

I never really knew I wanted to 'be' a writer, but I was always writing from a very young age. It became more conscious as an ideal when I was in my twenties.

Writing is hard work; it's also the best job I've ever had.