Ambitious Quote by Annie Besant

I started writing short fiction very briefly, as I imagine is the case for some novelists.

— William Gibson

The style developed over decades, really, but I started out writing pretty traditional stories, then became impatient. It was a writer named Russell Edson…

— Lydia Davis

I always wanted to write novels, even before I had read a lot of novels or had a very good idea of what they…

— Elif Batuman

I wrote my first two long novels and an anthology of short narratives, when I was a manager of my own jazz bar. There…

— Haruki Murakami

Initially I only decided to try and write a novel because I wasn't getting enough screenwriting work. It wasn't a long-held ambition, and certainly…

— Stef Penney

I've been writing as long as I've been able to form words. I never wrote with an idea of publishing anything until I began…

— Harper Lee

My husband wrote the story for my first book, but then he didn't want to do that anymore. So if I was going to…

— Natalie Babbitt

I always wrote as a vehicle for expression but did not try writing for publication until my mid-thirties, at which time I started writing…

— Elizabeth Berg

When I first started writing in my early 20s it was literary criticism for a very eccentric magazine called Books And Bookmen, which allowed…

— Jonathan Meades

My first attraction to writing novels was the plot, that almost extinct animal. Those novels I read which made me want to be a…

— John Irving

The first five years as a writer, I didn't know how to write at all. I couldn't write my way out of a white…

— Richard Meltzer

I didn't really start to write until I was almost 30, and I started with the short stories.

— Kate DiCamillo