Quotes About Authorship

Every book is like starting over again. I've written books every way possible - from using tight outlines to writing from the seat of my pants. Both ways work.

I don't have as tight a time limit anymore but I still write in long marathon sessions and then I won't write for a while, I'm not a write-every-day writer.

Maybe other writers have perfect first drafts, but I am not one of them. I always try to get the book as tight as I can, but you reach a point as the author where you have lost all perspective.

Doubtless, reading good books benefited me during the months and years of writing, yet I remained skeptical of any tight correlation to what I produced. That was naive.

What one writer can make in the solitude of one room is something no power can easily destroy.

The novel does not seek to establish a privileged language but it insists upon the freedom to portray and analyze the struggle between the different contestants for such privileges.

Whoever authors your story authorizes your actions.

Books want to be born: I never make them. They come to me and insist on being written, and on being such and such.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

The two most engaging powers of an author: new things are made familiar, and familiar things are made new.

No, Sir, it is a good thing; there is a community of mind in it. Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

Classical quotation is the parole of literary men all over the world.

No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, nor more wise when he had.

A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.

When once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen. But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any way you can.

The sad truth is, S—, most people are not writers. This has nothing to do with literacy—or intelligence, or general culture. There are people who can correct the grammar, spelling, diction, and style of a college English paper with the best of them—who are still not writers. Indeed, most of what gets published in books, magazines, and newspapers is not written by real writers—which is one reason why so much of it is so bad.

Sometimes I cannot tell who wrote what. That is upsetting. With some sections, I can remember the place and time I wrote them, but have no memory of the incidents described. Similarly, other sections refer to things I recall happening to me, but kne/o/w just as well I never wrote out. Then there are pages that, today, I interpret one way with the clear recollection of having interpreted them another at the last rereading.

Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.

I am only as good as my last publication. Guess I am doing ok in that area.

I always tell people that I became a writer not because I went to school but because my mother took me to the library. I wanted to become a writer so I could see my name in the card catalog.

Every writer is first a reader, and what we read matters.

But now I believe the book had its own story, a story it was writing the whole time. We were only characters in it, with no more choice than characters in a novel.

I realised early on that being an author is a hugely misunderstood job.

Copywriters, journalists, mainstream authors, ghostwriters, bloggers and advertising creatives have as much right to think of themselves as good writers as academics, poets, or literary novelists.