Quotes About Authorship

I do have fun writing, and a long time ago, I told myself, 'You got to have fun at this, or it'll drive you nuts.'

As a writer, you get to play, you get alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of.

If you wrote a page a day, at the end of the year you would have a book. Whether it's any good or not is beside the point, but you would have a book, instead of just talking about it all the time.

Each time I see a split infinitive, an inconsistent tense structure or the unnecessary use of the passive voice, I blister.

Even after I'd published three books and had been writing full-time for twenty years, my father continued to urge me to go to law school.

There are only two ways, really, to become a writer. One is to write. The other is to read.

even the outright deletions that Ayn Rand's editor should have taken care of).

People have writer's block not because they can't write, but because they despair of writing eloquently.

Anyway, the same words can be found in both books, which makes sense because they're written by the same author.

Over and over I feel as if my characters know who they are, and what happens to them, and where they have been and where they will go, and what they are capable of doing, but they need me to write it down for them because their handwriting is so bad.

But you can't teach writing, people tell me. And I say, 'Who the hell are you, God's dean of admissions?

She said that sometimes she uses a formula when writing a short story, which goes ABDCE, for Action, Background, Development, Climax, and Ending.

No one has expressed it better than a great novelist I heard once on a talk show who said something like You want to know the price I pay for being a writer? Okay, I'll tell you. I travel by plane a great deal. And I'm usually seated next to some huge businessman who works on files or his laptop computer for a while, and then notices me and asks me what I do. And I say I'm a writer. Then there's always a terrible silence. Then he says eagerly, 'Have you written anything I might have heard of?

Very few writers really know what they are doing until they've done it.

Now, practically even better news than that of short assignments is the idea of shitty first drafts. All good writers write them.

publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is.

I just try to warn people who hope to get published that publication is not all that it is cracked up to be. But writing is. Writing has so much to give, so much to teach, so many surprises.

Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein.

There is no cosmic importance to your getting published, but there is in learning to be a giver.

We're mimics, we're parrots - we're writers.

One of the things that happens when you give yourself permission to sart writing is that you start thinking like a writer

The first draft is the down draft - you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft - you fix it up.

I honestly think in order to be a writer, you have to learn to be reverent. If not, why are you writing? Why are you here?

Phil was mumbling that Reuben might become a writer after all and writers had a way of redeeming everything that ever happens to them.