Quotes About Authorship

I've written short stories in first person, but you have so much more control writing in third person. Third person, you know what everybody's thinking. First person is very limiting, and I could never sustain a first person novel before.

I've been writing since I was about thirteen but didn't start a book until 2007. I spent four years writing a sci-fi novel before I wrote 'The Bone Season' at nineteen.

Thirteen years I took on this last book.

I started to write in about 1950; I was thirty-five at the time; there didn't seem to be any strong motivation. I simply was endeavoring to put down in a more or less straightforward journalistic style something about my experiences with addiction and addicts.

We don't actually know if the person who wrote the Gospel of John had a written copy of Thomas because we don't know exactly when it was written.

In general, what we really want is a feeling when we read anything that the author has explored the territory as dutifully and as thoroughly as their spirit allows and as their heart allows.

I have ten commandments. The first nine are, thou shalt not bore. The tenth is, thou shalt have right of final cut.

I've never felt influenced by Ernest Hemingway though I suppose there is something inevitable there.

I had a period where I thought I might not be good enough to publish.

The moment a man sets his thoughts down on paper, however secretly, he is in a sense writing for publication.

I've lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That's the most terrible thing about being an author - standing there at your mother's funeral, but you don't switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

I don't do much more than organise other people's ideas and insights and thoughts, and sort of harvest them, and inventory them and present them.

I am not altogether confident of my ability to put my thoughts into words: My texts are usually better after an editor has hacked away at them, and I am used to both editing and being edited. Which is to say that I am not oversensitive in such matters.

When I got my very first phone call that I'd hit the 'New York Times' list, I had a small rush of 'I've made it!' But the next morning, it occurred to me I didn't know what it was, so I called my agent and asked what being a 'New York Times' bestselling author really meant. He informed me that I was now a thousand pound gorilla.

The Rift, which was well over a thousand pages of manuscript, took two years.

I came in on the decline. Phil Elliot was in first, he got his book out, he sold thirteen thousand, I think he got two issues out before I got mine in, this was March '87. He was out in December '86.

The only pressure I feel is to write good books. And to not replicate the previous book. Whether you have a thousand readers or a million readers it doesn't change the pressure. I never feel tempted to give the reader what I think the reader wants.

Perhaps, all writers walk such a line. In general - as we all do in our dreams - I believe I put something of myself into all the characters in my novels, male as well as female.

Sometimes I wonder if I talk to myself becuase I'm a writer, or if I'm a writer because I talk to myself

said maybe I will call myself Ross H. Spencer. I said he can't write either.

But authorship is not to be denied. Not even if you are Thomas Pynchon and stonewall all attempts to establish your actual existence. My own feeling is that Pynchon does not exist, and neither do the last five hundred pages of Gravity's Rainbow, but there is no question whatsoever that Thomas Pynchon is an author.

Ben Yagoda's fine book When You Catch an Adjective, Kill It.

shall have to write some raunchy stuff if I'm going to make much money.

People often ask me why my style is so simple. It is, in fact, deceptively simple, for no two sentences are alike. It is clarity that I am striving to attain, not simplicity.