Quotes About Author

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, 'Why don't you write your autobiography?'

The truth is, it's easier for me to write than talk... to express the state I'm in at any time.

I do what I do, and write what I write, without calculating what is worth what and so on. Fortunately, I am not a banker or an accountant. I feel that there is a time when a political statement needs to be made and I make it.

When I write, I tend to twist my hair. Something for my small mind to do, I guess.

It would not be amiss for the novice to write the last paragraph of his story first, once a synopsis of the plot has been carefully prepared - as it always should be.

When my friends asked me to blog, I thought why not write a book? People may be interested in knowing what it would take to be Rajini's daughter.

But I don't write so much now, because they're too painful.

I think the big lesson I've learned is that it's very hard to write satire in America because almost immediately, whatever you've thought of turns out to come true, or sometimes it already was true.

The tone of 'Into the Beautiful North' is really the way I write. 'Hummingbird's Daughter' was the anomaly. It was a once-in-a-lifetime phenomenon.

I'm a cartoonist. I write and draw comic books and graphic novels. I'm also a coder.

You are just in the middle of a struggle with words which are really very stubborn things, with a blank page, with the damn thing that you use to write with, a pen or a typewriter, and you forget all about the reader when you are doing that.

In order to write novels for a living - it's not pathological, but I do think and worry and brood and fidget about stuff that I'm working on.

I think the cardinal rule of learning to write is learning to read first. I learned to write by learning to read.

I have a British voice and a rather formal one at that, having been brought up in post-WWII Britain. My voice is perfectly suited to the sort of book I write, I think. It would not fit a contemporary, besides which I do not know enough about the contemporary world to write convincingly or comfortably about it!

Although I write dystopian fiction, I don't believe in dystopian fantasies.

I write by stealing time. The hours in the day have never felt as if they belonged to me. The greatest number has belonged to my day job as a physician and professor of medicine - eight to 12 hours, and even more in the early days.

Tolkien was quite a religious man, and so is George R.R. Martin. They kind of have this epic quality about them when they write the material.

I never sat down and said, 'I'm going to write historical fiction with strong romantic elements.' It was just the way the stories went.

I realize that I had always in my heart of hearts planned to write a biography of Marie Antoinette.

I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen.

The writer is the engineer of the human soul.

The writer in western civilization has become not a voice of his tribe, but of his individuality. This is a very narrow-minded situation.

Although he moved away from the Midwest for good at the age of thirteen, Ray Bradbury is a prairie writer. The prairie is in his voice, and it is his moral compass. It is his years spent in Waukegan, Illinois - later rechristened by Ray as 'Green Town' in many books and stories - that forever shaped him.

I wouldn't dream of commenting on Hilary Mantel as a novelist, frankly I'd be grateful if she stayed off my patch as a historian. She is intelligent, she is bright, she is an admirable writer. I happen to find her Tudor novels unreadable, but that's because I am a Tudor historian.