Quotes About Authorship

Well, we're meant to be writing stories today

Siobhan said that I should write something I would want to read myself.

Why do I love writing? I can be who I want, do what I want, hurt who I want, and make the world over, just the way I'd love to have it.

Reading is the parent of fine writing. It fosters familiarity with the written word & sets the template for a writer's journey ~ Mark Rubinstein

As does a magician, a writer creates a world, immerses the reader in it, & makes the reader believe it's reality.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE

She feels as if a book is writing itself just behind her; all she has to do is live. But there is nothing.

Writers are rarely their own best critics, nor are critics.

permission. When I began work on the translation long ago, it was an early and ready decision to dedicate the first volume to my wife and our only

People think because a novel's invented, it isn't true. Exactly the reverse is the case. Because a novel's invented, it is true. Biography and memoirs can never be wholly true, since they can't include every conceivable circumstance of what happened. The novel can do that. The novelist himself lays it down. His decision is binding. The biographer, even at his highest and best, can be only tentative, empirical.

I indicated that I wrote for the papers, not mentioning books because, if not specifically in your line, authorship is an embarrassing subject for all concerned. Besides, it never sounds like a serious occupation.

She had no ambition to write a good book, but was painfully anxious to write a book that the critics should say was good.

How can a man who, for a significant phase of his formation, shared his master's opposition to rhetoric have in maturity composed a masterpiece of the formal study of rhetoric? This

I couldn't write—or wouldn't write, at any rate—unable to face the grueling self-scrutiny that fiction demands

De schrijvers is natuurlijk de valsspeler bij uitstek. Hij maakt gebruik van middelen die anderen niet hebben. Zijn leven is een laboratorium waarin experimenten worden uitgevoerd ten behoeve van het vertellen van verhalen. Wat hem ook overkomt, hij kan altijd afstand nemen van zijn rampen, zijn tragedies, zijn mislukkingen, door erover te vertellen. Dat kunnen anderen niet altijd, niet op die manier, en dat maakt hem een valsspeler.

De schrijver is natuurlijk de valsspeler bij uitstek. Hij maakt gebruik van middelen die anderen niet hebben. Zijn leven is een laboratorium waarin experimenten worden uitgevoerd ten behoeve van het vertellen van verhalen. Wat hem ook overkomt, hij kan altijd afstand nemen van zijn rampen, zijn tragedies, zijn mislukkingen, door erover te vertellen. Dat kunnen anderen niet altijd, niet op die manier, en dat maakt hem een valsspeler.

Dear Mr Jinx: I'm afraid your idea is not at all original. Stories about writers whose work is always plagiarised even before they can complete it go back at least to H. G. Wells's 'The Anticipator'. About once a week I receive a manuscript beginning:

From my boyhood I have had an intense and overwhelming conviction that my real vocation lay in the direction of literature. I have, however, had a most unaccountable difficulty in getting any responsible person to share my views. - Cyprian Overbeck Wells: A Literary Mosaic

In the country of the story the writer is king.

The road to hell is very likely paved with my notes for stories and books and articles.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

I no longer believe that William Shakespeare the actor from Stratford was the author of the works that have been ascribed to him.

First published in 1893 and written in collaboration with Josef Breuer (1842-1925)

Whenever he saw his books in a store, he felt like he'd gotten away with something, said John Updike. Who also expressed the opinion that a nice person wouldn't become a writer. The problem of self-doubt. The problem of shame. The problem of self-loathing. You once put it like this: When I get so fed up with something I'm writing that I decide to quit, and then, later, I find myself irresistibly drawn back to it, I always think: Like a dog to its vomit.