Michael Crichton Quotes

If you're writing a novel, you're in a room for three or four years. There's not much coming in from the outside.

[When working on a book] I have an almost complete detachment from the world I live in, a sort of armor against distraction. I talk to people, move about, appear on the surface much as usual. But later on I have only a confused memory of what has happened during that period.

With my writing, because I live it, I have to be consumed by it, and that means you have to forget your other life, which is constantly pulling you from your work.

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

Writing is a very lonely occupation. To write you need to concentrate, to concentrate you need to lock yourself away. No distractions; you want your stream of thought uninterrupted.

When you're writing, it's a very solitary job. It's you and your word processor and a cup of tea.

When you write a book, you spend day after day scanning and identifying the trees. When you’re done, you have to step back and look at the forest.

When you do anything creative, you really have to live entirely in that world. I think my ability to do that is what makes me such a bad dinner guest. I'm always looking over someone's shoulder, taking in stuff around the room, immersed in the world of whatever I'm writing about, and keeping the characters completely in my head.

When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.

When you're writing fiction or poetry... it really comes down to this: indifference to everything except what you're doing... A young writer could do worse than follow the advice given in those lines.

It's all discipline and schedule for me. I mean, it's very easy to get distracted by the real world and things that intrude constantly, and it takes dedication to live totally in your head and be tuned out.

One constant writing ritual, no matter what I'm writing, is that I cannot write if people are around me. It wigs me out - the idea that someone is reading as I'm writing stuff.

I love reading and I love thinking - the reason that I love my books so much is that in order to write them I have to read and to think for years at a time about the same period of time.

Being isolated and on-location can be helpful in terms of being completely dedicated to the work, but somebody like me can also be dangerous in terms of this intense sort of void that you kind of potentially fall into.

Novel writing is solitary work.

It makes it harder to write if I watch a lot of television, because television is not like a written story.

I can do a book in three months if I spend all day, seven days a week at it and, in fact, I work better that way.

I could type in a closet and be fine. It's just a matter of cocooning myself. Just me and the story.

When I'm acting, that's all I'm doing. When I'm not acting, I'm not thinking about acting. If I'm writing, I'm just writing.

I should be concentrating on writing pages.

When I'm in the midst of finishing a book, I can be working around the clock.

The tough thing about writing is you go into a room alone, you close the door and you do your work.

I work all day, morning and afternoon, just about every day. If I sit there like that for two or three years, at the end I have a book.

When I work on stories, I tend to lose sight of everything else. I forget to pay bills or to shave. I don't change my clothes as often as I should.

Directing is extrovert and gregarious; writing is isolating, introverted, and lonely.