Quotes by Jean Auel

• I really fell in love with Africa.
• Life sometimes gets in the way of writing.
• I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true.
• I think of my books as mainstream and that's were most people who read them look for them in book stores.
• I'm just writing a story that I want to read.
• It took some time to gather the research and develop it into the storyline, and to finally finish an origin myth poem that I had been working on for twenty years.
• Though my books are written from a historical perspective, I have goon so far back that I am in the realm of prehistorical speculation rather than simple historical fact to weave my stories around.
• My fiction is reviewed by the mainstream press, by science fiction periodicals, romance magazines, small press publications and various other journals, including some usually devoted to archaeological and other science material.
• From the beginning, when I first got an idea for a story and wondered if I could write it, it has always been the story that has driven me.
• No, my publisher has always done the marketing.
• Of the two, I would think of my work as closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy.
• The idea led me into the research, which continues to give me more ideas for the story.
• Science Fiction is not just about the future of space ships travelling to other planets, it is fiction based on science and I am using science as my basis for my fiction, but it's the science of prehistory - palaeontology and archaeology - rather than astronomy or physics.
• And that's how I start myself. I usually go back a couple of pages, maybe to the beginning of the chapter, and I start reading. And as I'm reading, I'm tweaking - putting in a different word, changing the syntax, putting that clause over there, you know that sort of thing.
• I can't tell you any more than any other writer can tell you why they write, and I don't know what my influences are.
• I probably read 100 times more than I write, but that way when I move my characters through it, I know.
• Aside from sales, the letters from readers have been primarily positive.
• Each book has been different and has been challenging in its own way to write.
• From the beginning, the series has been story driven - I began with a story idea - but research feeds it.
• I could write historical fiction, or science fiction, or a mystery but since I find it fascinating to research the clues of some little know period and develop a story based on that, I will probably continue to do it.
• I don't write for publishers, certainly not for critics, and not for readers, But I am delighted that so many people have found my books enjoyable and want to continue to read them.
• I had an idea for a story about a young woman who was living with people who were different, not just superficially different - such as hair colour, or eye colour, or skin colour - but different in some significant way.
• I have heard Science Fiction and Fantasy referred to as the fiction of ideas, and I like that definition, but it's the mainstream public that chooses my books for the most part.
• I have been a reader of Science Fiction and Fantasy for a long time, since I was 11 or 12 I think, so I understand it and I'm not at all surprised that readers of the genre might enjoy my books.
• I can move my characters through it easily, because I understand the background; I've really studied it.