Mary Kay Andrews Quotes

I knew that I wanted to be a writer even before I knew exactly what being a writer entailed.

I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

It was a combination of an intense interest in children's literature, which I've always had, and the feeling that I'd just have a go and see if I could do it.

So, how to stay inside the world of entertainment without actually getting another job? I felt the only logical answer was to become a novelist. So I wrote the first book - driven by some very real feelings of desperation - and it worked.

I had thought of writing, actually, and that later on I'd be a novelist.

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

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

I did a minor in creative writing in college, but I didn't start writing until I stayed at home with my own children.

When I read 'Greenberg,' I had a really strong sense if I could be any kind of writer I wanted to be, I'd be this kind of writer. And I felt like, even in my experiences, what writing I had done, even on a small scale, when it was good, it shared some quality with it.

I have always aspired to be a writer, be it as an author or a screenwriter, whatever the medium.

I don't think there was a particular book that made me want to write. They all did. I always wanted to write.

Novel writing is solitary work.

So, I guess motherhood and the threat of not being able to pay my rent inspired me to be a novelist. But as far as what inspired me to be a writer, it's the stories. It sounds very cliched, but the stories rise up and demand to be told. They always have done, long before I became a writer.

I wanted to be a writer, but at the time, I spent my days working a retail job, my nights sleeping in my childhood bedroom, and while I had written short stories here and there, I didn't know how to write good fiction anymore than I knew how to perform good brain surgery.

I always felt a little worm inside me: 'Now you need to write a novel with a woman protagonist.'

Finding the discipline, the motivation, the focus, the passion to sit down in front of a blank piece of paper or a blank computer screen every day and then to make it come alive with characters and with plot is incredibly exciting and at the same time terrifying and frustrating, and sometimes it comes easy and sometimes it comes really hard.

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

My intent was to gain experience for fiction I eventually hoped to write. But there's no question I was drawn in by the hope that journalism would be a creative, thrilling environment.

I loved writing fiction. I mean, once I found the character, or the characters, and knew who they were and knew their back-stories, it really - I mean, I went into my studio every day, thinking, 'What's gonna happen to Billy today?'

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

It's that drama that drives authors, you know.

I was not going to use writing for advertising or journalism. I would tend bar, load trucks, chauffeur - do whatever it took. But from the moment I took my first writing workshop, I was a writer.

I write what I'd like to read and just hope that, along the way, others might like to read them, too.