Anne Rice Quotes

There are three things that make a person a writer: inspiration, perspiration and desperation.

I wanted to write stories for myself. At first it was purely an aesthetic thing about craft. I just wanted to become good at the art of something. And writing was very private.

I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written 'Just Kids' had I not spent all of the 80s developing my craft as a writer.

I always wrote. I wrote every day. I don't think I could have written 'Just Kids' had I not spent all of the '80s developing my craft as a writer.

If you want to be a writer, write a little bit every day. Pay attention to the world around you. Stories are hiding, waiting everywhere. You just have to open your eyes and your heart.

I was always writing, since I was, like, 12.

If you write enough, you begin to learn to do things. But in a way, you do start from zero each time.

I've always been a writer.

To be a writer, you need to like spending a lot of time by yourself in the company of imaginary people.

I knew I was a writer; I wanted to be a writer, but I didn't know what to write.

Write every day; never give up; it's supposed to be difficult; try to find some pleasure and reward in the act of writing, because you can't look for praise from editors, readers, or critics. In other words, tips that are much easier to give than to take.

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

How do we live the writer's life? There's only one simple answer: 'we write.'

If you wish to be a writer, write.

Write a lot and don't think about publishing - just the writing.

If you want to be a writer, just write. There's no magic to it.

My idea of writing is of unflinching and continual effort, somehow trying to find the right words until you reach a point where you can make no further progress and you either have something or you don't.

After 'A Suitable Boy,' I didn't write anything, not even a short story. I thought to myself: 'I ought to start writing.' But I can never force myself to write.

It's a lot to expect of yourself, to write a novel in a year. Anyway, you don't write a novel, you write a scene, and then another scene.

If you're young enough, any kind of writing you do for a short period of time is a marvelous apprenticeship.

But I think there are a set of experiences that turn a potential writer into a working writer, and then there are places in your life were you start to recognize what you want to do.

I'm not a writer where I feel particularly blessed by great inspiration every day. I don't. I have to work really hard at it to try and say the things I'm concerned with.

I spent several years acquiring the obsessive, day-to-day discipline that's needed if you want to write professionally, then several more, highly valuable years studying fiction writing at the University of Iowa.

Novel writing is solitary work.

The only strategy I know of is to write every day, which I don't always do, because sometimes I just can't, for various reasons that seem out of my control.