James M. Cain Quotes

I started writing morning pages just to keep my hand in, you know, just because I was a writer and I didn't know what else to do but write. And then one day as I was writing, a character came sort of strolling in and I realized, Oh my God, I don't have to be just a screenwriter. I can write novels.

Sometimes I think that novelists suffer from P.C.S.: Perpetual Childhood Syndrome.

I do want to say the process of writing a novel is riddled with self-doubt and self-loathing.

Writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational.

I suffer as always from the fear of putting down the first line. It is amazing the terrors, the magics, the prayers, the straitening shyness that assail one. It is as though the words were not only indelible but that they spread out like dye in water and color everything around them. A strange and mystic business, writing.

Here's what I love: I love sitting at my desk, staring at the blank screen, and beginning that conversation with my imaginary friends.

I've never had a writer's block, but still I think: 'Is it going to happen this time?' You never know what you're going to get; you just put your fingers on the keys and hope.

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

A writer of fiction lives in fear. Each new day demands new ideas and he can never be sure whether he is going to come up with them or not.

It took me nine months to write 60 pages. It was very frustrating.

I think what happens to young writers is that they use up every life experience that they have had up to that point for their first novel. Then you have to come up with something for the second novel, but you really don't have anything to say.

I have every sympathy for writers. It's a mystery to me what they do. I can edit. I can cross out and say, 'I'm not saying that' or, 'How about we move this to here? Wouldn't that make that bit of the story better?' But where any of it comes from is beyond me. I will never write a play or a novel.

I have a huge respect for writers and realise that this is not an area that I find easy. I doubt that I would have the patience in front of a blank sheet of paper to become a writer.

I believed, after writing 'Mrs. Kimble,' that I knew how to write a novel. I quickly discovered that I only knew how to write that novel. 'Baker Towers' was a different beast entirely; and I felt as though I had to learn to write all over again.

Completing any writing project, particularly a novel, is a daunting prospect. Many people become frozen by the prospect. Others keep waiting for the right time. Some wait for the spark of inspiration. Even experienced writers find it is easier to do anything other than actually write.

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

Writing is a strange and solitary activity. There are dispiriting times when you start working on the first few pages of a novel. Every day, you have the feeling you are on the wrong track. This creates a strong urge to go back and follow a different path. It is important not to give in to this urge but to keep going.

I have likened writing a novel to going on a journey, with some notion of the destination I will arrive at, but not the whole picture - which emerges gradually as a series of revelations, as the journey goes along.

Deciding to write a novel about something - as opposed to finding you are writing a novel around something - sounds to me like a good evocation of writer's block.

There are whole months at a time when my head is so full of ideas that I wake in the middle of the night and lie in the dark telling myself stories. There are also long, dark nights when I just know I'll never write another word: I'm finished, empty, a husk... Oh dear, yes, twitch, yawn, how I've suffered insomnia for my art.

Like most writers, I just create because I have a story to tell, really.

Usually, when inspiration strikes late, the light of day reveals that I haven't gotten an idea for a book so much as a psychiatric case study.

I tried writing out a plot with the second or third novel I wrote, and it was so boring, so desperately boring.

I dread first drafts! I worry each day that it won't come, that nothing will happen.

Generating comic material can sometimes get the better of you.