A Quote by George R. R. Martin

I've never been good with deadlines. My early novels, I wrote by myself. No one knew I was writing a novel; I didn't have a contract.

George R. R. Martin

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Been Contract Deadlines Early Good Knew Myself Never Novel Novels Writing Wrote

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George R. R. Martin
American - Novelist
Born: September 20, 1948

Many writers will get a contract by selling chapters and outlines or something like that. I wrote the entire novel, and when it was all finished, I would give it to my agent and say, 'Well, here's a novel; sell it if you can.' And they would do that, and it was good because I never had anyone looking over my shoulder.

George R. R. Martin

In my twenties and early thirties, I wrote three novels, but beginning in my late thirties, I wearied of the mechanics of fiction writing, got interested in collage nonfiction, and have been writing literary collage ever since.

David Shields

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

Hilary Mantel

Back in my 20s, when I wrote 'A Place of Greater Safety,' the French Revolution novel, I thought, 'I'll always have to write historical novels because I can't do plots.'' But in the six years of writing that novel, I actually learned to write, to invent things.

Hilary Mantel

I was an avid reader, but never thought seriously about writing a novel until I was in my thirties. I took no formal fiction-writing courses and never thought about these categories when I wrote my first novel.

M. J. Rose

I've been thinking a lot about why it was so important to me to do The Idiot as a novel, and not a memoir. One reason is the great love of novels that I keep droning on about. I've always loved reading novels. I've wanted to write novels since I was little. I started my first novel when I was seven.I don't have the same connection to memoir or nonfiction or essays. Writing nonfiction makes me feel a little bit as if I'm producing a product I don't consume - it's a really alienating feeling.

Elif Batuman

I finished my first novel - it was around 300 pages long - when I was 16. Wrote one more before I got out of high school, then wrote the first Lincoln Perry novel when I was 19. It didn't sell, but I liked the character and I knew the world so I tried what was, in my mind, a sequel. Wrote that when I was 20, and that one made it.

Michael Koryta

There are always deadlines I have to meet. I don't let myself get too close to the deadlines, so it's not like I'm just sweating bullets or anything if the clock is ticking. I never let myself get in that situation.

Scott Adams

I started writing seriously when I was 18, wrote my first novel when I was 22, and I've never stopped writing since.

Sue Grafton

I had no idea, when I was writing early on, that my poems would be published or read by anyone, never mind people I knew or would meet. I just wrote urgently - naïvely, I suppose, looking back.

Denise Duhamel

I've always been ambidextrous, writing short stories and novels, and I pretty much have been writing a novel and a handful of short stories every year since '91.

Catherine Ryan Hyde

I started writing novels by not thinking about actually writing a whole novel - that felt altogether too daunting. I thought out a rough idea, then wrote chapter by chapter, and then by the time I'd hit 40,000 words, it was a challenge just to see if I could get to the end.

Jojo Moyes

A lot of people have trouble with their second novel - the dreaded sophomore jinx. I wrote three books in between the two novels, and they just weren't very good.

Claire Cameron

I wrote a whole novel before The Beach. Unpublishable. Junk. But, for some reason I stuck at novels and wrote a second. Still not sure why I didn't give up. Stubborn, maybe.

Alex Garland

When I was fifteen I wrote seven hundred pages of an incredibly bad novel - it's a very funny book I still like a lot. Then, when I was nineteen I wrote a couple hundred pages of another novel, which wasn't very good either. I was still determined to be a writer. And since I was a writer, and here I was twenty-nine years old and I wasn't a very good poet and I wasn't a very good novelist, I thought I would try writing a play, which seems to have worked out a little better.

Edward Albee

I don't keep a diary or a journal. Sometimes I'll send emails to friends and that's a way of recording what I was thinking at any given time. But I've never been a journal keeper. I feel like part of that is because I'm always on deadline. I've been a freelancer my entire career and, at any given time, I have several deadlines for all sorts of things whether it's some magazine piece or ad copywriting or anything. Obviously, people with deadlines keep journals all the time but, for me, the idea of doing more writing is never appealing. It's why I never blog.

Meghan Daum

A Quote by George R. R. Martin

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