Aim Quote by Peter Ackroyd

I was really exposed to great old-time literature - the classics, the poetic realists like Strindberg and Ibsen and all those guys. I was…

— Kurt Sutter

I became a writer because during several of the most important years of my life, writing seemed to me to be the most unreal,…

— William Saroyan

I wanted to be a novelist from a very early age - 11 or 12 - but I don't think I ever thought I…

— Pat Barker

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

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…

— Hilary Mantel

I've always been drawn to writing historical characters. The best stories are the ones you find in history.

— Tony Kushner

When I was a boy, I began writing a biography of Shakespeare, and since then I've written a number of biographies of actors and…

— Gyles Brandreth

The only time I was ever approached to write a book was when I was most famous.

— Justine Bateman

For several decades, I believed it was necessary to be extraordinary if you wanted to write, and since I wasn't, I gave up my…

— Diane Setterfield

Wrote my first "novel" when I was six. Studied a bit in college, but then pursued history... But when I started writing professionally, it…

— David B. Coe

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

The earliest impetuses for writing, for me, were simply the strange things I happened to notice in my everyday life, stuff I read about…

— Dan Chaon