Daily Inspiration Quote by Sidney Sheldon

“Writing novels is the most exciting” reads like a modest sentence until you remember who’s saying it. Sidney Sheldon wasn’t the brooding, desk-bound literary saint; he was a professional momentum machine. His books are engineered for velocity: cliffhangers, reversals, glamour, danger. So when he calls novel-writing “exciting,” it’s less a romantic claim about inspiration than a statement about control. In a novel, Sheldon gets to rig the casino: set the stakes, hide the cards, decide when the door slams and when it swings open.

The subtext is competitive. Sheldon came up through Broadway and Hollywood, arenas where stories are committee-built, budget-limited, actor-dependent. The novelist’s desk offers a different high: unilateral authorship. You don’t negotiate with producers, casting, locations, or runtime. You don’t have to trim the twist because it’s too expensive to shoot. The excitement is the private thrill of omnipotence, plus the public thrill of a mass audience turning pages exactly the way you planned.

There’s also a defense embedded in the line. Genre fiction, especially the kind Sheldon wrote, is often treated as disposable. Calling it “exciting” rejects the need for prestige language. He frames the work in terms of sensation and propulsion, values his readers already understand. It’s a winking manifesto: if the goal is to keep people up at 2 a.m., novel-writing isn’t a quiet craft. It’s a rush.