Quotes About Authorship

every writer needs two selves—the generative self and the editor self.

Now try writing some pages to serve as later notes. Because you're not yet sure of voice or anything else, you're free from the need to squash in all manner of background information, explaining what year it is, etc. That stuff will just get you back in your head and drive you nuts. You're free to write as if all that stuff is in the reader's head already. It will be, by the time you get to this part of the book. You

The difference between the right word and the almost right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug. Mark Twain Every

To promote a book so long after it's in print makes you—according to novelist Ian McEwan—an employee of your former self.

In terms of cathartic affect, memoir is like therapy, the difference being that in therapy, you pay them. The therapist is the mommy, and you're the baby. In memoir, you're the mommy, and the reader's the baby. And—hopefully—they pay you. ("No man but a blockhead ever wrote for any cause but money," Samuel Johnson said.)

I'll go on writing till the end of my days. I have been writing too long to stop.

Reading, then writing, then desiring to write well, shaped in me that most joyful of circumstances—a passion for work.

If it is...not just one's own accomplishment that carries one from this green and mortal world--that lifts the latch and gives a glimpse into a greater paradise--then perhaps one has the sensibility: a gratitude apart from authorship, a fervor and desire beyond the margins of the self.

You may be thinking, Wow, that Mary Roach has her head up her ass. To which I say: Only briefly, and with the utmost respect.

I]t is really the ponderous books which I envy. How easy merely to put down everything you think or imagine. No holding back, no telling oneself that this does not belong, or that. No hewing to the line. No cutting. No fear of letting the interest die. No wastebasket. How wonderful. And how dull!

I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked every morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative

I will tell my story, and my reader shall judge for me. I will tell my story, and so contrive to pass some few hours of a long eternity, become so worrisome to me.

I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations.

And in another light-year or two I was through the word-barrier, and the book had suddenly reached the stage – the wonderful moment to get to – where I could walk right into my imaginary country and see things that I had not consciously created, and listen to people talking and watch them moving, all apparently independent of me.

Though an angel should write, still 'tis devils must print

These writers take the essence of every person around them, turn them into books and stories without permission or even a simple thank-you, and want all the credit and glory for themselves.

E. C. FERGINS

Stevie, how many stories - It's all one story, Stevie said, and the confidence in her voice surprised her. It was about money then, and it's about money now.

It's two thousand pages and nothing happens. It's all terrible. I wrote the first book and then I forgot how to write. It used to be that I would sit and write and I would go into some other world—I could see it all. I was totally in another place. But the second it became something I had to do, something in me broke. It's like I used to know the way to some magical land and I lost the map.

I wrote the first book, and then I forgot how to write. It used to be that I would sit and write, and I would go into some other world--I could see it all. I was totally in another place. But the second it became something I had to do, something in me broke.

Maureen Johnson

I trust that no one will tell me that men such as I write about don't exist. That this book has been written—and published—is my proof that they do.

Looking back, I sometimes ponder the age-old question of how much difference the particular characteristics of individual leaders make in the sweep of history—whether those of us who rise to power are mere conduits for the deep, relentless currents of the times or whether we're at least partly the authors of what's to come.

I never put real people into my fiction -- I can't see the slightest point of that, when I have the alternative of inventing utterly subservient slave-people, whose every detail of appearance and behavior I can bend to serve my theme and plot.