J. R. R. Tolkien Quotes

I don't usually think of my writing as a 'challenge' because I enjoy the process so much. I suppose that's what's helped me to avoid 'writer's block' all these years.

In a way, I started 'Goon Squad' not even realizing I was writing a book. I thought I was just writing a few stories to stall before starting this other book that I wanted to write - or thought I wanted to write: I still haven't written it.

The easiest thing to do on earth is not write.

We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.

I always have a story in my head that needs to be written, or at least I think I do. But I usually can't find the time to write it.

With the novels, I try to write a few pages a day - it doesn't sound much, but it can be difficult if I'm not sure where the story is going.

I've always said the hardest aspect of the job of being a writer is writing.

There was a time in my life when I wasn't sure I'd ever write a short story again because I had started writing novels, and I am fundamentally a lazy person, and the fact is that a novel is a lazy person's form, really. That is, you can amble; you can digress.

I keep telling myself I should try very hard to write a novel of about 210 pages... I don't seem to be capable of it, but I keep hoping it will happen.

It's easier to come up with new stories than it is to finish the ones you already have. I think every author would feel that way.

Ever since I was twelve, I dreamed of being an author. I just never had the fortitude to see any of my stories through to completion. I would start a book, get a few chapters in, and grow bored or get distracted by something else.

I'm constantly battling writer's block; it usually takes me two hours to write anything.

I have two ideas for novels at the moment, neither of them all that conventional, but I'm not ready to choose between them yet, let alone settle down to the process of writing.

Like lots of people who say, 'I'm going to write a novel,' it's actually more comfortable to think I could write a novel than to discover that you can't.

A lot of people, I think, harbor some kind of ambition to write a novel - they say, 'One day I'm going to write a novel,' and they maybe find the first three pages quite easy, and then they hit a kind of brick wall, and they think that that brick wall means that they're not a writer.

If a writer is good at what he does, it's not easy to do a good job every day... To invent something new is almost an impossible task.

If somebody says that they want to write a book but do not know what to write about, they will never write a book.

Anyone can sit down and write two pages of a novel, then forget about it, and a week later write five pages of a screenplay, then forget about it, and a week later start another novel... etc, etc.

I have a bad tendency to get rapidly bored with my own material, so rewriting is hard for me. I mean, I already know the story and would rather read something new.

There's nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, 'Well, okay, I'm going to do something of high artistic worth.'

You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.

I used to get up and write every day, even if I wasn't working on a specific thing. Now, when I have a thing I'm in the middle of, I do that, but when I'm not, time can go by when I'm not writing at all.

I've always been a writer.

I feel like writing a book there's always a version in your head that's an amazing version, but then you write the version that you can write.

Usually after finishing a novel, I have a head full of bad ideas for the next one.