Pearl S. Buck Writing Quotations

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

No writer, I believe, should attempt a novel before he is thirty, and not then unless he has been hopelessly and helplessly involved in life. For the writer who goes out to find material for a novel, as a fishermen goes out to sea to fish, will certainly not write a good novel. Life has to be lived thoughtlessly, unconsciously, at full tilt and for no purpose except its own sake before it becomes, eventually, good material for a novel.

Never, if you can possibly help it, write a novel. It is, in the first place, a thoroughly unsocial act. It makes one obnoxious to one's family and to one's friends. One sits about for many weeks, months, even years, in the worst cases, in a state of stupefaction.

Just about everything significant in my life happened after I passed forty. I was a housewife and mother, but yearned to be a writer. I worked at my writing whenever I could snatch a moment, and I assembled several manuscripts. I was just about forty when my first novel, East Wind, West Wind, was published. Then a few months later came The Good Earth. My career was launched at last, and it has given me the richest possible satisfaction

Write a novel if you must, but think of money as an unlikely accident. Get your reward out of writing it, and try to be content with that.

If you start to revise before you've reached the end, you're likely to begin dawdling with the revisions and putting off the difficult task of writing.