Quotes About Authorship

What it takes is to actually write: not to think about it, not to imagine it, not to talk about it, but to actually want to sit down and write. I'm lucky I learned that habit a really long time ago. I credit my mother with that. She was an English teacher, but she was a writer.

You always feel like a hack and a fraud when you're writing. It's just how it goes.

I'm a very laboured writer. I hammer it out sentence by sentence, and it takes a long time. That's what the work is, right? To make the reader think it is not hard to do.

For all my longer works (i.e. the novels) I write chapter outlines so I can have the pleasure of departing from them later on.

Writing a book is always a hard job. One is always tempted to limit oneself to dreaming it.

I am old and do not suffer fools gently and if you expect me to review your work, it better meet my stringent standards for logic and science.

I finished my first book seventy-six years ago. I offered it to every publisher on the English-speaking earth I had ever heard of. Their refusals were unanimous: and it did not get into print until, fifty years later; publishers would publish anything that had my name on it.

A book is like a child: it is easier to bring it into the world than to control it when it is launched there.

Not that I disclaim the fullest responsibility for his opinions and for those of all my characters, pleasant and unpleasant. They are all right from their several points of view; and their points of view are, for the dramatic moment, mine also. This may puzzle the people who believe that there is such a thing as an absolutely right point of view, usually their own.

the beauty and nobility, the august mission and destiny, of human handwriting.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

Literature is too full of 'acknowledgments' and squabbles about originality...

Dorothea was not only his wife: she was a personification of that shallow world which surrounds the appreciated or desponding author.

I was extraordinarily lucky. I wrote a book because I wanted to see if I could write a mystery. Someone nagged me into sending it to a contest, which it won, after which I was offered a two-book contract, thus requiring the writing of a second book.

Creating the characters is the most creative part of the novel except for the language itself. There I am, sitting in front of my computer in right-brain mode, typing the things that come to mind - which become the seeds of plot. It's scary, though, because I always wonder: Is it going to be there this time?

I sometimes wonder, with the Oxbridge comics, the broadcasters seem to say, at some point, now I trust you to do a documentary, you can be the voice for a maths show, or whatever. I don't think we're ever considered in that way.

Of course, I also hear from critics who detest what I do, and while sometimes I feel rather proud of having made various the loathsome people or groups angry, at other times I wonder why I put up with such grief.

On the one hand I wonder, Was this really my story to tell? On the other hand, I just wanted the story to be told. But the truth is that I didn't think anybody was going to read it.

When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write, I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'

When a book comes out I wonder if one person will buy it. It's agony. Of course it's stupid, but it's agony.

I hate first drafts, and it never gets easier. People always wonder what kind of superhero power they'd like to have. I wanted the ability for someone to just open up my brain and take out the entire first draft and lay it down in front of me so I can just focus on the second, third and fourth drafts.

The first book you write because of the way it makes you feel. The second one you can't help but wonder how it's going to make the reader feel.

As I read 'The Infinities', with its magical, playful richness, its sensuous delight in the power of language to convey the strangeness and beauty of being human, I wondered if J. M. Coetzee, with his bleak, pared-down, elemental view of the world, had ever read a Banville and, if he had, whether he had envied him his astonishing powers.