Quotes About Authorship

I'm a little harsh. When people say, 'I have writers block. What do you suggest?' I say, 'If you can't write, don't write. No one needs your writing. Don't torture yourself.'

I tell people the first time I decided to write a novel I was in my mid-20s, and it was, 'Well, it's time to see if I can do this.' I basically flipped a coin to see if I was going to write science fiction or if I was going to do a crime novel. The coin toss went to science fiction.

Writing on a computer makes saving what's been written too easy. Pretentious lead sentences are kept, not tossed. Instead of sitting surrounded by crumpled paper, the computerized writer has his mistakes neatly stored in digital memory.

I don't think I ever got the hang of the writers' room. I love collaborating with people, but I really do my best work alone, and I think I would want to - if I did something again, I think I'd want to take total ownership the way Aaron Sorkin or David Kelley does.

My total year's income from working as hard as I possibly could from writing went from like $30 one year to about $70 the next year. And it made me realize that maybe you couldn't really pay the rent that way.

This is a ferocious truth, because a child knows no better. A child is never the author of his own history. I suppose this is well known.

I don't mind citing a bad author if the line is good.

In any book, it is impossible to avoid some mistakes, some confusion, some incorrectness of language, and some misuse of notation. If you find any such things in the present book, then correct them or improve them for yourself, or write your own book.

Seth Grahame-Smith

Being a writer is a good, good thing.

I've always believed that as an author, I do 50% of the work of storytelling, and the reader does the other 50%. There's no way I can control the story you tell yourself from my book. Your own experiences, preferences, prejudices, mood at the moment, current events in your life, needs and wants influence how you read my every word.

Many authors have the "write it and it will sell" attitude and are sadly disappointed when their book sales don't explode. Successful authors know that they are their best marketing tool. You must doggedly promote, consistently reach out to media and scheduled events, capitalize on social media to spread the news, and commit to persistently promote your book for it to succeed.

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien

I was a woman and did not yet think of myself as a writer. I was a mapmaker.

And I'm a slow writer: five, six hundred words is a good day. That's the reason it took me 20 years to write those million and a half words of the Civil War.

The writing can be its own reward, as you discover more things that you can do. It counts a lot, though, when a story connects with a reader and they take the time to tell me about it.

MIke Lee writes with honesty, penetration, wit and the ability to surprise the reader with an unexpected turn from time to time that enriches the experience.

When I present or speak, I write the slides myself. And regarding time, I would like to be able to publish more than I do.

For no man can write anything who does not think that what he writes is, for the time, the history of the world.

The greatest gift anyone can give to a writer is time.

I've realized that I can't multitask in the writing department; I can only kind of do one thing at a time.

I've been writing full-time since I was 23.

At the same time, I went through college, received a Ph.D. and started to teach. I wrote books.

I'm sure you're aware, with the time it takes to put these books together, everything can suddenly start coming out at once even though I wrote anything between one and five years ago.