Luke Davies Quotes

I try very hard to write the best book I possibly can, every time.

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

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.

Write every day, just to keep in the habit, and remember that whatever you have written is neither as good nor as bad as you think it is. Just keep going, and tell yourself that you will fix it later.

As a writer, you have to first of all write what you want to. Listen to advice, by all means, but don't get bogged down in it.

Get your butt in a chair and write. If it comes out weak or bad or clunky or ordinary, then accept that this happens to everyone. Everyone. Get it down, get it done, and fix it in the rewrite. Just like everyone from Stephen King to J. K. Rowling to Chuck Palahniuk does.

Usually, I would mistrust a book if it took that long to write. Usually, if it isn't done in two years, I suspect there's something wrong and throw it away.

I now can be sure that, once I start writing a book, I'll be able to finish it. I've also become more assured about my 'voice' as a writer and being able to keep the characters true to themselves.

This is not a screenplay. I don't do twenty drafts. I'm not going to show this to you until it's published or accepted for publication. You can make whatever suggestions you want, but I probably will ignore them entirely.

But it's for every writer to decide his own pace, and the pace varies with the writer and the work.

I often meet frustrated young writers who say they've only got so far and just can't finish a book. Even if you don't happen to use what you've worked on that day, it has taught you something and you'll be amazed when you might come back to it and use it again.

It is important for poets and writers today to know their shortcomings, and be able to edit their own work as well as reject them if they are not up to their standards.

Really, what you should tell a novelist is, 'Keep going until you finish the draft. Don't show it to anyone.'

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

Many writers who choose to be active in the world lose not virtue but time, and that stillness without which literature cannot be made.

I'm not a compulsive writer. I wish I could be compulsive about something. I have no regular writing routine.

The number one secret of being a successful writer is this: marry an English major.

There's also a level of discipline I use as a writer, designed to get better at what I'm doing, that requires quite a lot of study and quite a lot of hard work as well.

I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn't have a contract.

At the outset, my notion of being a writer was that you would have moments of inspiration and moments of frustration, when you'd crumple up your pages and toss them away. On one side, the dustbin would fill up, and on the other side, pages would rise into a novel.

To be able to have the space to sit down and write has always been my central policy.

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

I would not send a first story anywhere. I would give myself time to write a number of stories.

I didn't have any desire I might have had 10 years ago to shoot every single word that I wrote.

I read what I write over and over and make corrections and improvements, until I reach the conclusion that the material deserves to stand on its own.