Quotes About Authorship

There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject's sake, and those who write for writing's sake. [...] The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.

A book can never be anything more than the impress of its author's thoughts; and the value of these will lie either in the matter about which he has thought, or in the form which his thoughts take, in other words, what it is that he has thought about it.

Payment and reserved copyright are at bottom the ruin of literature. Only he who writes entirely for the sake of what he has to say writes anything worth writing. It is as if there were a curse on money: every writer writes badly as soon as he starts writing for gain.

The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.

Quem escreve para os tolos encontra sempre um grande público.

This is what it means to have autonomy - you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

Whatever the limits and travails we face, we want to retain the autonomy—the freedom—to be the authors of our lives.

This is what it means to have autonomy—you may not control life's circumstances, but getting to be the author of your life means getting to control what you do with them.

the reason for the delay is not usually laziness or unwillingness. The reason is more often that the necessary knowledge has not been translated into a simple, usable, and systematic form.

All we ask is to be allowed to remain the writers of our own story.

Whatever the limits and travails we face, we want to retain the autonomy—the freedom—to be the authors of our lives. This is the very marrow of being human.

For the first time I really feel that my writing has a substance and stature that will survive me.

Only a hundred years ago the idea that an order might arise without a personal Author appeared so nonsensical to you that it inspired seemingly absurd jokes, like the one about the pack of monkeys hammering away at typewriters until the Encyclopedia Britannica emerged. I recommend that you devote some of your free time to compiling an anthology of just such jokes, which amused your forebears as pure nonsense but now turn out to be parables of Nature.

The best author is a dead author, because he's out of your way and you own the play. Take what he has given you and use it for what you need.

I like to make fun of Jeffy [of Family Circus] the most, because I know the grown-up Jeff Keane personally and enjoy ridiculing him.

Unlike scholarly journals, mass-market advice books are rarely reviewed by experts in the field. Instead of getting tested research findings, most of the time you get what some author claims worked for him or her, or what someone thinks might work for you, or what some publisher's marketing department hopes you will think might work for you, all mixed in with "time-tested rules" that might have worked in the past but no longer hold true.

I really want to be a writer but I don't know what to write about You could write about us

If there's a better book than this, I haven't written it.

Words cannot describe all the things I have left to write

I get an urge, like a pregnant elephant, to go away and give birth to a book.

he had read and absorbed more than he could understand, so he lived by pastiche and pretence.

Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler's heart, kill your darlings.

If you expect to succeed as a writer, rudeness should be the second-to-least of your concerns. The least of all should be polite society and what it expects. If you intend to write as truthfully as you can, your days as a member of polite society are numbered, anyway.

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There's no way around these two things that I'm aware of, no shortcut.