“When I finally got tired of arguing with her and decided to write a novel as if I was some kind of formulaic, genre writing drone, just to prove to her how awful it would be, I wrote the first book of the Dresden Files.”
A Conversation With Jim Butcher, The SF Site, McCune, Alisa, 2004, 2008-02-04 http://www.sfsite.com/08b/jb182.htm,
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Jim Butcher 383
American author 1971Related quotes

“I have decided that maybe I want to write when I grow up. I just don't know what I would write.”
Source: The Perks of Being a Wallflower

1970s
Context: Ever since the secret trip to China, my own relationship with Nixon had grown complicated. Until then I had been an essentially anonymous White House assistant. But now his associates were unhappy, and not without reason, that some journalists were giving me perhaps excessive credit for the more appealing aspects of our foreign policy while blaming Nixon for the unpopular moves.
These tendencies were given impetus by an interview I granted to the Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci, without doubt the single most disastrous conversation I ever had with any member of the press. I saw her briefly on Nov. 2 and 4, 1972, in my office. I did so largely out of vanity. She had interviewed leading personalities all over the world. Fame was sufficiently novel for me to be flattered by the company I would be keeping. I had not bothered to read her writings; her evisceration of other victims was thus unknown to me.
As quoted in "Special Section: Chagrined Cowboy" in TIME magazine (8 October 1979) http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,916877,00.html
On how she hopes to change poetry by bringing it towards visual art in “A Graphic Revolution Talking Poetry & Politics with Giannina Braschi” https://www.academia.edu/36916781/A_Graphic_Revolution_Talking_Poetry_and_Politics_with_Giannina_Braschi in Chiricú Journal (2018)

So I went ahead and wrote it.
Introduction to his reading https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYnfSV27vLY of Lord of the Flies in the unabridged audio version (1980)

“You never learn how to write a novel. You just learn how to write the novel that you're writing.”

On balancing novel writing with her personal life in “Diana Gabaldon on Her ‘Outlander’ Writing Process & Knowing Sam Heughan Was Jamie” https://collider.com/diana-gabaldon-outlander-interview/ in Collider (2018 Aug 2)

The Chicago Tribune (October 16, 2005)
2007, 2008