Quotes About Authorship

Unbeknown to me, my manager, under my very nose (in a crouching position) has all these years been secretly compiling a book from my correspondence. I often wondered what she was doing in my office. She never did a stroke of work for me. All the time, I have been working for her.

I'm a single parent, a working mother, an executive, and an author. My greatest accomplishment will be to raise three wonderful children.

I mean, the wonderful thing about writing a book is that you're getting a finished product at the end of the day. You're communicating directly with the reader.

One of the more depressing things about reading your fiction 25 years later, or 10 years later, is you realize the only things going on are things you made go on. Strange and interesting and new and wonderful things don't happen. It's the book you wrote; that's all.

I don't think that books are wondrous, magical things that come from nowhere. It's important that a book has clues about where and how it was written.

I found the success of 'In a Dark, Dark Wood' really distracting when I was writing 'The Woman in Cabin 10,' but in a way, the fact that 'Cabin 10' was doing well felt quite freeing while I was writing 'The Lying Game.'

I hate thinking about writer's block! I don't have writer's block much, knock on wood, but if I do, I think it's usually because I haven't done enough research and am therefore unable to create a fully realized world.

I loved Woody Allen's short pieces. I was equally influenced by Woody Allen and Norman Mailer. I was very into this idea of being high-low, of being serious and intellectual but also making really broad jokes.

It took me little more than two years to complete my film, 'Woody Allen: A Documentary.' I conducted hours of filmed interviews with Woody, who put forward no ground rules about questions I could ask, or topics to avoid.

Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.

The material came bubbling up inside like a geyser or an oil gusher. It streamed up of its own accord, down my arm and out of my fountain pen in a torrent of six thousand words a day.

No one can come and claim ownership of my work. I am the creator of it, and it lives within me.

My job is to engage, entertain, work out my life, tell a certain truth.

I don't want to spoil the magic, but it's a very curious thing that honestly baffles me. It's the nearest we'll ever get to playing God, to suddenly produce these fully formed creatures. It is a bit odd. Other aspects you work out more - you rework sentences, you rework imagery. But not characters.

For a very long time, I wrote a book a year, and was eager and willing to do it, to put bread on the table, to have my work out there. Now I must write a book every two years, and that's never enough time, either.

I work on a word count basis, so I have to write three thousand words a day. I can write them in the morning, I can write them in the evening; as long as they get done.

I write a thousand words a day.

Don't try to write too much in a single session. One thousand words a day is quite enough. Stop after about four or five hours.

I'm not Cormac McCarthy, but I can get my point across in a thousand words.

I don't read books regularly, because I'm always writing them. I've written 30 books, thousands of pages.

I started my first novel when I was 10, and have produced thousands of pages of juvenilia since.

I don't type my sentences on an arena's pitch, surrounded by thousands of cheering or booing fans - I don't feel pressure to please a crowd.

We're more interested in someone writing a really great answer that's going to be read by thousands or tens of thousands of people over the next few years as it stays on Quora and as it gets distributed on the Internet.

I used to write stories on Facebook, and people started reading them, from 10-12 people initially, to thousands of people later.