Quotes About Authorship

I love to be creative and to put flesh onto the ideas that are inside of me. And there are not that many great programs that are coming out through Hollywood, and I'm tired of waiting around for someone to hand me a good script, so I'm going to go and produce something.

Suddenly I could control every aspect of publishing, and it was incredibly empowering! I didn't have to sit by the phone any longer waiting for things to happen because I was the one making them happen. That's why I decided to start Amber House Books.

For me, the best places to write are on planes, trains and at airports. Not hotel rooms but hotel lobbies. I'm really happy when I'm waiting for a plane and the message comes that it's three hours late. Great, I'll get to write!

I still pinch meself when I wake up of a morning. Who ever thought I'd be a children's author - let alone a best-selling children's author?

When I wake up in the morning, I need the writing to go to. I begin there. And that's not an accident, I mean, that habit of getting up in the morning and going to my writing first thing.

There would be nights when I would wake up and couldn't get back to sleep. So I would go downstairs and write. The staff had a pool going on how many pages of typing I would bring in here in the morning.

But usually I'll wake up and start writing about nine o'clock. I'll probably write for about three hours, and I'll do that over the next month and a half.

I wake up with the story in my head, so I really like to be at my desk about five minutes after I wake up. So I don't get dressed. I put on a bathrobe, I make tea and sit at my desk.

I usually don't write at night, but there are times where I wake up at 3 in the morning and write all night.

My typical morning involves some time on the treadmill, but obviously I skip that a lot. Mostly, I wake up, check my email, then get to work on the various interviews and questions and phone calls that come with being an author.

I'm very aware when I share a stage with other writers that I'm much less driven than they are. I don't wake up in the middle of the night, pregnant with paragraphs. I don't suffer for my text twenty-four hours a day.

Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running.

I'm often asked how I write books, but I don't think my approach is suitable for everyone. If I walked into a creative writing class, all I could say to them was 'I tend to make it up as I go along.' I'm not sure that's brilliant advice.

Creatively, most of my influences come from the literary world: Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara. Writers are my heroes.

Some day I shall write a novel and call it 'A Walking Tour in the Congo' or 'Thrills and Spills in Aeronautics'; but I keep this type of title as a last & mercenary resort.

The best way to get me to write more books is to read the ones that exist!

I've written the best work I know how. And I'm appreciative of the people who read it and care about the work - and that's pretty much the end of that.

I was always told you're not going to make much money from writing. You can actually do it. Now I've built a really good, big house out of words.

Writer's block is a fiction.

I began as a writer and started blogging in 2001, first on politics, anonymously.

I was 35 when I started writing Shadow and Bone,' and my only goal was to finish a book because I had never managed to do it.

Never index your own book.

I do the same kind of rewriting that I do in the shorts that I do in long books - and that is a lot. The book really comes to life in the rewriting.

I've adjusted to this, that my books are not going to get unanimously good reviews.