A Quote by Dana Spiotta

The writer has to take risks and go somewhere full of mystery and possibility for the novel to deepen over the years it takes to write it.

Dana Spiotta

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Deepen Full Go Mystery Novel Over Possibility Risks Somewhere Take Takes Write Writer Years

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Dana Spiotta
American - Author

Every time that I write a novel I am convinced for at least two years that it is the last one, because a novel is like a child. It takes two years after its birth. You have to take care of it. It starts walking, and then speaking.

Umberto Eco

The thing is doing it, that's what it's all about. Not in the results of it. After all what is a risk? It's a risk not to take risks. Otherwise, you can go stale and repeat yourself. I don't feel like a person who takes risks. Yet there's something within me that must provoke controversy because I find it wherever I go. Anybody who cares about what he does takes risks.

Al Pacino

I don't write the same book over and over - I think if I did that, I would stop writing. I couldn't write a series with the same character, and I couldn't write a romance novel over and over again that takes place at a different beach every year. That's not who I am.

Jodi Picoult

I don't think of myself as a mystery or thriller writer, honestly. I am in awe of mystery writers and don't think I have what it takes to write such a book.

Celeste Ng

Often, you have to fail as a writer before you write that bestselling novel or ground-breaking memoir. If you're failing as a writer - which it definitely feels like when you're struggling to write regularly or can't seem to earn a living as a freelance writer - maybe you need to take a long-term perspective.

J. K. Rowling

There are some risks we choose to take because the benefits from taking them exceed the possible costs. Optimal behavior takes risks that are worthwhile. This is the central paradigm of finance: we must take risks to achieve rewards, but not all risks are equally rewarded.

Robert F. Engle

It takes me two to three years to write a novel. A screenplay is 100 pages and takes five years.

Nick Hornby

No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

Pearl S. Buck

'Great Expectations' was an important novel in my adolescence. It was very much one of those emblematic novels that made me wish I could write like that. It helped that my models as a writer were dead over a hundred years before I began to write.

John Irving

It's important to write a mystery novel where the takeaway is not a giveaway - where something could be read over and over.

Jimenez Lai

Don't force yourself to write. Some people can write a novel in a few months, whereas for others it can take over a year. I'm lucky to be one of the former - but, even so, if I'm not in the mood to write, I won't. I'll go off, do something else and come back to it when I'm ready.

Cecelia Ahern

It usually takes me about three years to research and write one of my historical sagas; this is one reason why I take medieval mystery breaks, for they can be completed in only a year.

Sharon Kay Penman

The process for writing a picture book is completely different from the process of writing a chapter book or novel. For one thing, most of my picture books rhyme. Also, when I write a picture book I'm always thinking about the role the pictures will play in the telling of the story. It can take me several months to write a picture book, but it takes me several years to write a novel.

Sarah Weeks

I feel like I've got a novel in me somewhere, but that's something... I was just talking to a buddy of mine about it, who's a writer as well, and he's nearly done with his first novel, and it's taken him 11, 12 years to do it. And I can totally understand; it's a long process.

Corey Taylor

I'm not the sort of writer who can walk into a party and take a look around, see who's sleeping with whom and go home and write a novel about society. It's not the way I work.

E. L. Doctorow

The age of the book is not over. No way... But maybe the age of some books is over. People say to me sometimes 'Steve, are you ever going to write a straight novel, a serious novel' and by that they mean a novel about college professors who are having impotence problems or something like that. And I have to say those things just don't interest me. Why? I don't know. But it took me about twenty years to get over that question, and not be kind of ashamed about what I do, of the books I write.

Stephen King

A Quote by Dana Spiotta

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