Gene Wolfe Quotes

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.

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 may be able to write a novel, you may not. You will never know until you have worked very hard indeed and written at least part of it. You will never really know until you have written the whole of it and submitted it for publication.

Writing a novel is a lot like reading one.

Writing novels takes up about 100% of my available working time.

When I was starting out, I did not do short fiction well, because I kept wanting to write books.

I had just begun an M.A. in Creative Writing, and I had to write a novel, so I began writing a novel that later became 'A Life Apart.'

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

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 won't read novels while writing novels.

For years and years I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel.

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

A novel is achieved with hard work, the short story with inspiration.

Though The Kite Runner was my first completed novel, I had been writing on and off for most of my life, primarily short stories, and primarily for myself.

When you write a novel, you make other people see your imaginary friends.

I've been writing for a long time. I sat down to write my first novel in the middle of March of 1982.

A novel usually takes me two years. A year to research and plan and dream. Then a year to write.

As a novelist, I mined my history, my family and my memory, but in a very specific way. Writing fiction, I never made use of experiences immediately as they happened. I needed to let things fester in my memory, mature and transmogrify into something meaningful.

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.

You have to learn how to write each book.

I discovered ... that a novel has nothing to do with words in the first instance. Writing a novel is a cosmological matter, like the story told by Genesis (we all have to choose our role models, as Woody Allen puts it).

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.

Good novels are not written, they're rewritten!

The only good grades I ever got in school before I was kicked out were for creative writing. I thought that fiction might be in my future but then my career took a different path once the Beatles showed me what a blast being in a band could be. Writing my memoir Late, Late at Night reminded me how much I love the craft. So I decided to give fiction a shot again.Magnificent Vibration is the result. I’m still not quite sure where it came from, but once I got going, it practically wrote itself. I’ve heard writers I admire speak of that phenomenon, so maybe I’m on the right track.