Quotes About Authorship

When people say they write for themselves, that's probably what they do. I will admit that I don't write for myself; I write to be read. I've got the reader in my mind all the time.

I can't remember a time when I wasn't trying to get something down on paper.

Around the time I turned 30, I wanted to publish a novel

Each time, I think I'm never going to write another book. It never gets easier.

Nobody has time to write a book. Some people just do it anyhow.

To be perfectly honest the old habits, specifically deadlines, still very much inform what I do. I am brutally disciplined about getting manuscripts in on time.

I've never written a children's book, but when people meet me for the first time and I say I write books, they invariably reply, 'Children's books?' Maybe it's something about my face.

Writing a book is such a full-time job. If you're away for a few days, you have to start again.

I don't think I would do better books if I wrote full time. I write for amateurish reasons.

Surely it was time someone invented a new plot, or that the author came out from the bushes.

In my case, the long gaps between my books have got quite a lot to do with lack of confidence. A lot of the time when I'm not writing I start thinking I can't do it.

Every time one of my books sells a million copies in paperback, Pan Macmillan gives me a gold statuette of Pan. I have about 20 of them.

I wrote 'White Teeth' in the late nineties. I didn't really feel trepidatious about it. It was a different time.

I coauthored my first nonfiction book by the time I was 25. I have been involved in nonfiction documentaries, newspapers, TV and internet since that time.

I thought a dignified thing to do would be to live in the country by the time I'm 50 and write books

Certainly I had a really terrible time with 'Emotionally Weird.' When I finished it, I thought, 'I can't write any more.

I still have a full-time day job, which is why it took me five years to write An Ear to the Ground, and why I won't have another book finished by next week.

Honest to God, Bill, the way things are going, all I can think of is that I'm a character in a book by somebody who wants to write about somebody who suffers all the time.

During that time, I began writing and designing the propaganda that we distributed to the students who we were trying to convince to join us.

I used to sit home with my computer and write. After the Newbery, I probably spend more than half my time on the road.

I spend most of my time writing.

The guy who sits at the keyboard and types is so much smarter than I am. I think I got into writing so that I could spend as much time with that guy as possible.

I haven't always been a writer and I suppose I tiptoed around the idea of writing full time, because it's so isolating.

I never wanted to make a graphic novel. As soon as you become a 'writer,' you have to be intelligent all the time... I like the fact that I have the right once in a while to say silly things.