Quotes About Authorship

As a girl, I sat awestruck at the feet of Harriet Ne, author of 'Tales of Molokai'. It was she who used to say, 'I myself have seen it,' after telling a particularly hair-raising ghost story - a phrase that I borrowed for one of my titles.

The first job of a writer is to be honest.

I always market research my books before I hand them in by showing them to five or six close friends who I trust to be honest with me, so they are very heavily re-written already.

To be honest, I used to always procrastinate when I write. I mean, I love writing, but I hate it.

No matter how many books you've written, whenever you sit down to write a new book, you always feel the same challenge - how do you shape this story into a book that people are going to love.

I think that you have to keep the reader front and centre if you're going to write something that people are going to love and be entertained by.

I've always been able to survive by writing, though.

I don't have any contracts, so I don't have to split any money up. That was my main thing - just making sure I'm taking care of myself and taking care of Lil B. Just learning to survive, for myself and as a human in America.

I was sitting in the toilet and I was by myself. I was tired of playing with the roller, so I said I'd better write a book.

Every so often, I'll get an idea from a dream, but most of the time, ideas come to me while I'm toiling away at the keyboard just like every other writer.

There are times when I'll send a manuscript to an editor, and I'll think it is the most likely project I've ever sent them. And they might call me the next morning and say they couldn't tolerate it. That happens so frequently that I've given up any expectation of knowing what anybody's going to like.

A great writer is a great writer... Tolstoy was not a woman, but 'Anna Karenina' is still a pretty good book.

I am a writer. I am rooted in Tolstoy, I am rooted in Homer, I am rooted in Cervantes.

I don't believe that my first name is Leo or that my last name is Tolstoy. I'm a storyteller.

I write in defense of the beliefs I fear are least defensible.

He never liked things that weren't his idea first.

There is nothing glamorous in what I do. I'm a working man. Perhaps I'm luckier than most in that I receive considerable satisfaction from doing useful work which I, and sometimes others, think is good.

There is only one way to defeat the enemy, and that is to write as well as one can. The best argument is an undeniably good book.

A writer should be able to express himself easily, naturally, copiously in a form that frees his mind, his energies. Why should he hobble himself with formalities?

Every book, every story, has a sort of invisible signature at the front. And when you've written the first few lines of a story, those govern all the rest that follows.

With a novelist, like a surgeon, you have to get a feeling that you've fallen into good hands--someone from whom you can accept the anesthetic with confidence.

sometimes we love what we wrote, critics hate it. Sometimes we hate what we wrote, critics love it.

the idea of being a "published" author is an antiquated and virtually meaningless one.

Heather Graham was raising children while making the time to write what has now become 100 novels.