Ngaio Marsh Quotes

I finish the book so I can see how it's going to end. I write that first sentence, and if it's the right first sentence, it leads to the right second sentence and three years later you have a 500-page manuscript, but it really is like going on a trip, going on a journey. It's a voyage.

You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.

Writing a book is hard. It turns out, writing a second book is twice as hard.

To write a book is for all the world like humming a song—be but in tune with yourself, madam, 'tis no matter how high or how low you take it.

I love writing. I love to write, and I would eventually love to have some of my work produced.

Books are great for if you want to work on the craft of writing for yourself, or, you know, to write novels or indie films, stuff like that.

Most writers want to share their essay or book much too quickly. Those who accept the pain of hard work and revising are those who get published.

I met, not long ago, a young man who aspired to become a novelist. Knowing that I was in the profession, he asked me to tell him how he should set to work to realize his ambition. I did my best to explain. 'The first thing,' I said, 'is to buy quite a lot of paper, a bottle of ink, and a pen. After that you merely have to write.'

Writing a book is the most terrifying thing that I've ever done. It's so much harder than writing for television because it is a completely different skill set.

The search for the word gets no easier but nobody else is going to write your novel for you.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

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.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

When I want to read a novel, I write one.

When I started working on 'Stay With Me,' I thought it would take two years to complete the novel.

I want to write books.

I have a great respect for people that write. I don't know how they do it every day... or do novels that they have to use their minds instead of just their memories. It's tough duty.

Yes, writing a novel, my boy, is like driving pigs to market - you have one of them making a bolt down the wrong lane; another won't get over the right stile.

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

All good writing is built one good line at a time. You build a novel the same way you do a pyramid. One word, one stone at a time, underneath a full moon while the fingers bleed.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people.

The strange thing about writing is that it's so easy to write a novel. It is really easy. But it's getting there to the point where it's easy that's hard. The hard part is to get there.

Eventually the writing takes time. What I want to do is get the story down and I want to know what happens as I write my way into the knowledge of the story.

I always think about myself as a writer; that comes out of being a reader first, and I don't think I kind of got to really playing with language in any formal way probably until I was in my mid-twenties.

The desire to write a novel is the single required prerequisite for writing a novel.