Taking out the journal she’d packed, and intending to make…

The women's movement was coming, but I didn't know it in 1956-1957, when I began to write.

— Grace Paley

'A Fair Maiden' existed in notes and sketches for perhaps a year. When I traveled, I would take along with me my folder of…

— Joyce Carol Oates

“I began to write again. I wrote just for the fuck of it.”

— Fred Leebron

When I was about twenty-one, I published a few poems. Maybe I wrote a couple of stories before, but I really began to write…

— Grace Paley

I began to write because I was too shy to talk, and too lonely not to send messages.

— Heather McHugh

I began to write short pieces when I was living in a room too small to write a novel in.

— Angela Cartwright

“He began to write his thoughts and observations concerning the day's events [...] It helped him better understand everything he had seen and done…

— Christopher Paolini

The main characters for 'The Seer and the Sword' made an appearance one night and then haunted me for over five years before I…

— Victoria Hanley

I was a writer first, and knew I'd be a storyteller at age seven. But since my parents are very practical, they urged me…

— Tess Gerritsen

My books have done extremely well, I know. But I don't honestly feel much different from when I began to write. I still think…

— Chinua Achebe

When I first began to write fiction, I didn't think I was a comic writer; I thought I was a serious writer. I was…

— Anthony Burgess

I began to write in the first place because I expected everything to change, and I wanted to have things in writing the way…

— William Saroyan

I wasn't entitled to dream so big. The idea of me being a writer wasn't even possible in my mind. Even when I began…

— Rupi Kaur

I began to write in an enclosed, self-confident literary culture. The poet's life stood in a burnished light in the Ireland of that time.…

— Eavan Boland

When I began to write seriously, 40 years ago now, my chosen form was the novel.

— William Nicholson