“I believe that half the trouble in the world comes from people asking What have I achieved? rather than What have I enjoyed? I ve been writing about a subject I love as long as I can remember--horses and the people associated with them, anyplace, anywhere, anytime. I couldn t be happier knowing that young people are reading my books. But even more important to me is that I ve enjoyed so much the writing of them.”
“Every writer is a frustrated actor who recites his lines in the hidden auditorium of his skull.”
“All writers are insane!”
“There is something else which has the power to awaken us to the truth. It is the works of writers of genius. They give us, in the guise of fiction, something equivalent to the actual density of the real, that density which life offers us every day but which we are unable to grasp because we are amusing ourselves with lies.”
“Who is better off? The one who writes to revel in the voluptuousness of the life that surrounds them? Or the one who writes to escape the tediousness of that which awaits them outside? Whose flame will last longer?”
“Your only responsibility as a writer is to be true to the story that has chosen you as its writer.”
“All the time I m not writing I feel like a criminal. It s horrible to feel felonious every second of the day. It s much more relaxing to actually write.”
“Good writers define reality; bad ones merely restate it. A good writer turns fact into truth; a bad writer will, more often than not, accomplish the opposite.”
“Better to work for yourself alone. You do as you like and follow your own ideas, you admire yourself and please yourself: isn’t that the main thing? And then the public is so stupid. Besides, who reads? And what do they read? And what do they admire?”
“One day, I shall explode like an artillery shell and all my bits will be found on the writing table.”
“If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?”
“The Llama is a woolly sort of fleecy hairy goat, with an indolent expression and an undulating throat; like an unsuccessful literary man.”
“Deserted libraries hold the shades of writers who worked within, and are haunted by their absence. ”
“There is a deeper, more profound reason for this craving for acceptance and glory. Put simply, it s because all writers are fat and/or ugly. And generally socially inept. Me being the notable exception, of course. Writers want to be special, because they re so not. They re losers, overgrown kids who ve never escaped from being misfits and who have run away into their own imaginations in an attempt to find self-esteem. Why do you think they all star in their own books? Self included.”
“It’s lovely when writers I like like each other.”
“There is something fascinatingly awkward about an author photo. I m drawn to those glossy shots in the back of books, mostly because the subjects never look happy to be there.”
“We writers constantly try to build up our own confidence by getting published, making sales, winning prizes, joining cliques or proclaiming theories. The passion to write constantly strips this vanity aside and forces us to confront that loneliness and the uncertainty with which human beings, in the end, live and die.”