Augusten Burroughs Quotes

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'

I've been writing fiction since I was a kid. From the age of 15 to 25, I probably wrote more than 50 short stories, one of which was published in 'The Paris Review' in 1989.

I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

I never studied writing, but I'd always been a reader and had a secret fantasy about being a writer.

In my younger days, I was trying to write sophisticated prose and fantastic stories.

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.

I'm a compulsive storyteller, an avid reader, and have always nurtured the secret goal of spending my life as a writer.

My own 'sentimental favorite' is always the novel I haven't yet written - I suppose that's the one I consider my 'masterpiece' as well.

I have a really good idea for a novel and would like to just kind of try my hand at fiction. I'm starting to kind of get a really good body of work going from a literary standpoint. As long as the audience is there, man, I'll keep cranking them out.

I'm very interested in writing - it just takes so much discipline, whether it's short stories or novels.

I have many books that I want to write; I'd like to think that I'll be around for another 20 years or so and write another dozen novels, probably some sort of imaginative literature... Never again another seven-volume saga.

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 was writing from the time I was 12 years old, but I originally wanted to be a novelist.

I've read science fiction my whole life. I never really dreamed that I'd be a published science fiction writer myself, but a short story I started years ago sort of demanded to be turned into a novel.

I've always wanted to write a novel. It's overwhelming and daunting, and it's one of those things that every writer fantasizes about doing.

Novel writing is solitary work.

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

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.

Don't romanticise your 'vocation.' You can either write good sentences or you can't. There is no 'writer's lifestyle.' All that matters is what you leave on the page.

I really absolutely loved writing my first book.

Ever since I was in my teens I had plans at one point in my life to write a novel.

I feel a bigger sense of fulfillment when writing a novel, and short stories are more about instant gratification.

I was convinced that the only thing I wanted to do ever - was write novels.

I was 17 when I decided to write stories as big as cathedrals, overflowing with the kind of memorable and audacious characters Walker Percy, Ernest Hemingway and Saul Bellow created.

The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It's not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.