Quotes About Authorship

Rarely does a complete idea come to me. I basically start with just a small scene or a snatch of dialogue and force myself to write and to keep writing. Sometimes it becomes a book.

If I had a plot that was all set in advance, why would I want go through the agony of writing the novel? A novel is a kind of exploration and discovery, for me at any rate.

We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship.

For me, a novel is always the result of my attempt to impose myself on raw circumstances. It is a concrete form of lived experience.

Raymond Carver is good. I think he'll be appreciated more and more. He's an easy writer to imitate.

What's important about me is that I really have, in ways I never could have foreseen when I was young, a writing career that's reached a lot of different places.

I have reached the point where I know that as long as I sit down to write, the ideas will come. What they will be, I don't know.

There are things we can control and the things we can't control. I can't control how people react to the work I do.

Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book.

Well, for people who want to write best sellers, the best advice I can give is to say that the novel has to engage the reader emotionally.

By definition, memoir demands a certain degree of introspection and self-disclosure: In order to fully engage a reader, the narrator has to make herself known, has to allow her own self-awareness to inform the events she describes.

The great work must inevitably be obscure, except to the very few, to those who like the author himself are initiated into the mysteries. Communication then is secondary: it is perpetuation which is important. For this only one good reader is necessary.

When I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It's not my business whether people like or dislike it.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

Reader loyalty will stay because I'm not changing.

I was quite a reader before I became a writer.

I've always been a reader and a writer.

I've been writing for as long as I can remember, and reading even before that. My mom still has stories that I wrote when I was in kindergarten. I was a reader and a re-reader. That's the main reason I became a writer.

The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.

Writing a novel is an intense and lonely business, but you have the reward at the end of a very direct dialogue between you and the reader.

I'm so focused on trying to craft the story that I'm in my own little world with it and that process. The one reader I'm trying to please as I write is me, and I'm pretty difficult to please.

As an author, I really hate a reader like me. There's no loyalty.

I have an idea, and I have a perpetrator, and I write the book along those lines, and when I get to the last chapter, I change the perpetrator so that if I can deceive myself, I can deceive the reader.

I tend to spend a lot of time building characters that the reader will believe in and sympathize with.