Quotes About Authorship

You can't write a book about Hillary Clinton and not anticipate some blowback, so I always knew it was going to be something.

Writing a novel is agony.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Rudyard Kipling was the only popular writer of this century who was not at the same time a thoroughly bad writer.

This edition is based on Orwell's typescript of November 1948, amended according to his proof corrections and taking in a few readings that are deemed to be his from the American first edition.

For whom, it suddenly occured to him to wonder, was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn.

From ... the age of five or six, I knew that when I grew up I should be a writer. ... I tried to abandon this idea, but I did so with the consciousness that I was outraging my true nature and that sooner or later I should have to settle down and write books.

A man who would write the same book twice could not even write it once.

And yet it is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality.

Kuigi ma pidin otsima ja ka otsisin õigeid sõnu, paistsin ma tegevat neid kirjanduslikke pingutusi peaaegu vastu tahtmist, mingi välise sunni ajel.

Un escritor más escrupuloso se preguntará ante cada una de sus frases, al menos, cuatro cosas: ¿qué trato de decir?; ¿con qué palabras puedo expresarlo?; ¿qué imagen o frase hecha lo dirá más claro?, y, por último, ¿tiene esta imagen la frescura suficiente para causar en el lector el efecto deseado? Y

Jättes kõrvale vajaduse elatist teenida, on minu meelest kirjutamisel, vähemalt proosa kirjutamisel, neli suurt motiivi. Erineval määral eksisteerivad nad igas kirjanikus, proportsiooniti aeg-ajalt varieerudes vastavalt õhkkonnale, milles ta elab.

I teach "The Singers" to suggest to my students how little choice we have about what kind of writer we'll turn out to be.

Forbes had fully invested herself in her sentences. She had made them her own, agreed to live or die by them, taken total responsibility for them. How had she done this? I didn't know. But I do now: she'd revised them.

Reflect that you could have written the book so much better yourself, if only you had the time and the inclination for the task; and that the literate won't be listening, if you're speaking on air, or doing more than glance at your review, if it appears in print; and go right ahead! There will be no reprisals. If the author is young and struggling, he won't dare to expose your pretensions; and if he is well established he won't think it worth while to do so.

He is James Henry Alden, and I'm Henry James Alden.

I write for myself and strangers. The strangers, dear Readers, are an afterthought.

It's a lot harder for an author that's unpublished to say, 'Hey, here's a new book.' There's nothing of theirs to read, so you don't know what it's going to be like. Kickstarter is great, but you also have to put your work out there whenever you can so you can build a reputation.

Once upon a time, I was a workaholic clocking more than 80 hours per week. That changed after I began to write. I now work only around 35 hours per week. I do not work on weekends because these are the days that I use for research as well as for my writing.

I worked on 'Always and Forever, Lara Jean' for a few months before I breathed a word of it my editor or agent.

If you feel that there's the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can't, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you'd be a very strange person indeed.

I came to writing because I joined the North Clare Writers' Workshop, which met every week at Ennistymon Library.

I've taken every writing class I've had available. I took classes in high school, and I took English and writing classes in community college, but I dropped out of college. I also attended a local writing workshop two years ago.

I get started at 5:30 in the morning and write till 10 A.M. Then I hike six or seven miles before going back to work.