Quotes About Authorship

To write is human, to edit is divine.

Writing is magic, as much the water of life as any other creative art. The water is free. So drink. Drink and be filled up.

I'm one of those people who doesn't really know what he thinks until he writes it down.

I like to get ten pages a day, which amounts to 2,000 words. That's 180,000 words over a three-month span, a goodish length for a book — something in which the reader can get happily lost, if the tale is done well and stays fresh.

When you write you tell yourself a story. When you rewrite you take out everything that is NOT the story.

Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time (or the tools) to write. Simple as that.

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little (or not at all in some cases) should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written.

I believe the first draft of a book — even a long one — should take no more than three months…Any longer and — for me, at least — the story begins to take on an odd foreign feel, like a dispatch from the Romanian Department of Public Affairs, or something broadcast on high-band shortwave duiring a period of severe sunspot activity.

Read a lot, write a lot is the great commandment.

I write for love, but love doesn't pay the bills.

Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you, in other words, but then it goes out. Once you know what the story is and get it right — as right as you can, anyway — it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it.

A writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave.

How does it happen that a writer who's not even very good - and I can say that, I've read four or five of his books - gets to be in charge of the world's destiny? Or of the entire universe's? If he's not very good, why didn't you stop at one? Mrs. Tassenbaum smiled. Touché. He is readable, I'll give him that - tells a good story...

The writer must have a good imagination to begin with, but the imagination has to be muscular, which means it must be exercised in a disciplined way, day in and day out, by writing, failing, succeeding and revising. [ The Writer's Digest Interview: Stephen King & Jerry B. Jenkins (Jessica Strawser, Writer's Digest , May/June 2009)]

There are lots of guys out there who write a better prose line than I do and who have a better understanding of what people are really like and what humanity is supposed to mean – hell, I know that.

A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God.

If you wrote something for which someone sent you a cheque, if you cashed the cheque and it didn't bounce, and if you then paid the light bill with the money, I consider you talented.

If a writer knows what he or she is doing, I'll go along for the ride. If he or she doesn't... well, I'm in my fifties now, and there are a lot of books out there. I don't have time to waste with the poorly written ones.

You know, King said, I'm not much good at telling stories. That sounds like a paradox, but it's not; it's the reason I write them down.

I think telling stories is like pushing something. Pushing against uncreation itself, maybe.

Easy reading is the product of hard writing

If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot…reading is the creative center of a writer's life…you cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you.

It's hard for me to believe that people who read very little - or not at all in some cases - should presume to write and expect people to like what they have written. Can I be blunt on this subject? If you don't have time to read, you don't have the time - or the tools - to write. Simple as that.

The George George Stark George Starked over the Starky Stark.