A Quote by John Lanchester

I don't answer the phone or do my email; I don't do anything until I've got the day's writing done. I have a word count for every day: 500 for fiction, 1,000 for non-fiction, and journalism is 1,500. That's a level I can sustain.

John Lanchester

Quote Topics

Answer Anything Count Day Done Email Every Every Day Fiction Got Journalism Level Non-Fiction Phone Sustain Until Word Writing

Quote Author

John Lanchester
British - Novelist
Born: February 25, 1962

I write 1,000-1,500 words. The next day, I rewrite it and add 1,000-1,500 words to the end of it.

Patrick Ness

I write every day for most of the work day, and I try to write 2,500 words per day... If I don't make it a routine and treat it like a job, I'd never get anything done.

David B. Coe

On a normal novel, I would like to get 2,000 to 2,500 words done in a day; I average 10,000 words a week, and then there's a day for planning. With the historical ones, it's a lot harder because you have to stop and double-check facts.

Sarah Pinborough

My interest is, my one hobby is, maintaining a democracy. If you get these 500,000 soldiers advocating anything smelling of Fascism, I am going to get 500,000 more and lick the hell out of you, and we will have a real war right at home.

Smedley Butler

In fact, when I began selling 'Phenomenal Woman' T-shirts on International Women's Day last year, the campaign was supposed to run just through March, for Women's History Month. At the time, I hoped to sell around 500, maybe 1,000 T-shirts in total. We ended up selling 2,500 T-shirts on the first day alone.

Meena Harris

If I wanted to connect like I do now, I'd have to write 500,000 letters, get 500,000 stamps, send them out and wait for them all to come back. This stuff is instantaneous. I can see if someone is having a bad day and send them a smiley face and have an effect on them. It's fun, but it's also a very powerful thing.

Donnie Wahlberg

I haven't written a word of fiction since 2009. I have no desire to write fiction. I did what I did and it's done. There's more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.

Philip Roth

If you interrupt the writing of fast narrative with too much introspection and self-criticism, you will be lucky if you write 500 words a day and you will be disgusted with them into the bargain. By following my formula, you write 2,000 words a day and you aren’t disgusted with them until the book is finished, which will be in about six weeks.

Ian Fleming

In a sense, journalism can be both helpful and detrimental to a writer of fiction because the kind of writing you need to do as a journalist is so different. It has to be clear, unambiguous, concise, and as a writer often you are trying to do things that are more ambiguous. I find that writing fiction is often an antidote to reading and writing too much journalism.

Aravind Adiga

I can't recommend technical writing as a day job for fiction writers because it's going to be hard to write all day and then come home and write fiction.

Ted Chiang

I think of science fiction as being part of the great river of imaginative fiction that has flowed through English literature, probably for 400 or 500 years, well predating modern science.

J. G. Ballard

Write all the time. I believe in writing every day, at least a thousand words a day. We have a strange idea about writing: that it can be done, and done well, without a great deal of effort. Dancers practice every day, musicians practice every day, even when they are at the peak of their careers – especially then. Somehow, we don’t take writing as seriously. But writing – writing wonderfully – takes just as much dedication.

Theodora Goss

When I signed up for Google Plus, it recommended 500 people for me to invite. You know, and once I invited those 500 people I got another 500 people. So it has a huge install base that it can start from.

Jennifer Lee

If I had simply wanted to trade on an insult to Islam, I could have done it in a sentence rather than writing a 250,000-word novel, a work of fiction.