Quotes About Authorship

I have been aspiring to write some sort of literature for a long time.

Obviously not a Stephen King level writer, but I'd written short stories and short fiction, from the time I was 12.

I can write three novels in the time it takes to write one novella. I'm probably not going to go with that form again.

I like a good story well told. That is the reason I am sometimes forced to tell them myself.

NOTICE 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

I have been an author for 20 years and an ass for 55.

There have been daring people in the world who claimed that Fenimore Cooper could write English, but they are all dead now.

Which is him? The grammar was faulty, maybe, but we could not know, then, that it would go in a book someday.

When ever I get the urge to write, I lie down and it usually passes.

Authorship is not a trade, it is an inspiration; authorship does not keep an office, its habitation is all out under the sky, and everywhere the winds are blowing and the sun is shining and the creatures of God are free.

So there ain't nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I'd a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn't a tackled it and ain't going to no more.

I do not claim that I can tell a story as it ought to be told. I only claim to know how a story ought to be told

Writing is easy. All you have to do is cross out the wrong words. -Mark Twain

Between 1870 and 1905 Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) tried repeatedly, and at long intervals, to write (or dictate) his autobiography, always shelving the manuscript before he had made much progress. By

PREFACE Book

Consider the three years sped. Now look around on England. A happy and prosperous country, and strangely altered. Schools everywhere, and several colleges; a number of pretty good newspapers. Even authorship was taking a start; Sir Dinadan the Humorist was first in the field, with a volume of gray-headed jokes which I had been familiar with during thirteen centuries.

Le romancier qui écrit une histoire d'adulte sait exactement où et comment s'arrêter, c'est le plus souvent par un mariage. Quand il s'agit d'un enfant, il s'arrête où il peut.

There's only one choice now: finish what Zampanò himself failed to finish. Re-inter this thing in a binding tomb. Make it only a book.

there would be punishment and pain, and there would be happiness, too. That was writing.

They are quite incapable of coming up with anything even remotely as terrible as what I do all day—and they've stopped trying. Now I just dream

Hans Christian Andersen: We co-write them. I just don't do any of the writing. I change the bits I don't like and then erase all the rest from history. I'm more like a German theatre director. Or, y'know, a German generally.

The first object of a novelist, is to tell a tale. If he has no story to tell, what is he there for? Possibly he has something to say which is worth saying, but he should say it in another form.

You write not for children but for yourself. And if by good fortune children enjoy what you enjoy, why then you are a writer of children's books.

He who writes carelessly confesses thereby at the very outset that he does not attach much importance to his own thoughts.