Authorial Ambitions Quotes

I get a lot of letters from people. They say "I want to be a writer. What should I do?" I tell them to stop writing to me and to get on with it.

As a precocious teen I dreamed of being Graham Greene. Well, as it turned out, I never wrote a great novel, sadly, and I never converted to Catholicism, happily, but I did do one thing he did. That is, in middle age I moved to a seaside town and got into a right barney with the local powers-that-be.

I saw myself as a writer, a novelist, even though I was living the life of a mother and housewife. Writing was - and is - what I do.

I always wanted to be a writer since I was around 12 years old and I wrote my first book.

Basically, it's somebody who got stuck having to interview me who really wants to be a novelist, so they're writing these novellas and I was like, "It's not true, that didn't happen, they just made all that up! Why don't they just go ahead and be a novelist instead of bothering with interviewing me?"

When I started, I was pretty sure I was going to be writing some goofy little wizard novels that might make me some part-time money and would hopefully lead to something I could do better.

Many people who want to be writers don't really want to be writers. They want to have been writers. They wish they had a book in print.

I never really wanted to be a singer - not with any longevity. But I always wanted to be a writer.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

For a person whose sole burning ambition is to write - like myself - college is useless beyond the Sophomore year.