This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back there in the real world the memories will overtake you and swamp you and wilt your tenacity. Tenacity stamina.. close off to everything and everyone but your writing. That s the bloody price. I don t know maybe it's some kind of ultimate selfishness. Maybe it's part of the killer instinct. Unless you can stash away and bury thoughts of your greatest love you cannot sustain the kind of concentration that breaks most men trying to write a book over a three or four year period. Leon Uris
About This Quote

The quote above is one of my favorites. When I was writing my first book, I used to go to the same coffee shop every day. I never went alone, but I would always be by myself. That was six years ago.

I remember what it felt like when I started to write for the first time. It felt like a huge burden had just been lifted off my shoulders because writing was something that I wanted to do more than anything else in the world before that point. My goal in life had always been to be a writer; however, in the beginning, it seemed like an impossible dream.

But in reality, it was not an impossible dream at all because whenever there is something you want more than anything else in the world (or at least any other thing in the world), you will find a way to make it happen.

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More Quotes By Leon Uris
  1. Miss Abigail, I want to be an author because writers know when a person is lonely. I mean, when Molly read me some books, those writers reached out and said, Look Gideon, we know about your loneliness and we know you're feeling downtrodden. And they...
  2. Talent isn't enough. You need motivation-and persistence, too: what Steinbeck called a blend of faith and arrogance. When you're young, plain old poverty can be enough, along with an insatiable hunger for recognition. You have to have that feeling of "I'll show them." If you...
  3. I know writers have to be crazy. But more than that that, they have to get made and stay mad. If things don't make a writer mad, he'll end up writing Flopsy, Mopsy, and Cottantail.
  4. A novel takes the courage of a marathon runner, and as long as you have to run, you might as well be a winning marathon runner. Serendipity and blind faith faith in yourself won't hurt a thing. All the bastards in the world will snicker...
  5. This was what I came to found. The conquest of loneliness was the missing link that was one day going to make a decent novelist out of me. If you are out here and cannot close off the loves and hates of all that back...
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