I could never have pictured myself writing a book when I was 25 years old. My mom was an English teacher but I wasn't that way growing up.
I'd been writing stories since I was a child. I wrote little books for my mom and bound them myself with needle and thread. Mostly, they were about my pets.
Growing up devouring horror comics and novels, and being inspired to become a writer because of horror novels, movies, and comic books, I always knew I was going to write a horror novel.
Alice: When I get home I shall write a book about this place... If I ever do get home.
Have you ever heard the expression: Walk a mile in my shoes, and then judge me? And write your own books.
The comforts come from my movie and television writing. It is unusual to live this well simply from books.
I painted myself into a corner by writing a whole book on this one period. The summer of 1927 came to an end, but nothing else did - all of these peoples' lives went on.
And yes, there's a simplicity to writing books because you're not a member of a team, so you make all the decisions yourself instead of deferring to a committee.
As a writer, it's disheartening to write books that you pour your soul into and not have them distributed widely enough to find their audience.
Writing a book is like sliding down a rainbow! Marketing it is like trudging through a field of chewed bubblegum on a hot, sticky day.
My grief is that the publishing world, the book writing world is an extraordinary shoddy, dirty, dingy world.
I can't imagine writing a book without some strong female characters, unless that was a demand of the setting.
It wasn't until I was 37 that I grasped the great truth that you've got to write your own books and nobody else's, and then everything followed from there.
I noticed in America that if you write a book of any kind, you're made to be the representative of all the issues that might surround it.
If I'm in a state about a book, I'll get up at 6 A.M. and write before breakfast, but usually I'll start afterwards and then work a full day with a break for lunch.
I wrote 'Sophie's World' in three months, but I was only writing and sleeping. I work for 14 hours a day when I'm working on a book.
I always work from an outline, so I know all the of the broad events and some of the finer details before I begin writing the book.
I used to believe that if I could do certain things - write a book or be a successful musician - that I'd be transformed into a happy person, but it doesn't work that way.
People always ask, 'How do you write so many books?' And I say, I work a lot. I work six or seven days a week.
When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.
Writers have it easy. If you write a bestseller or have your book made into a movie, you'll never have to work again, or so the myth goes.
