Quotes About Authorship

Read and write four to six hours a day. If you cannot find the time for that, you can't expect to become a good writer

The real importance of reading is that it creates an ease and intimacy with the process of writing; one comes to the country of the writer with one's papers and identification pretty much in order.

eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist's head is none of his business

I also employed the world-famous Hemingway Defense. Although never clearly articulated (it would not be manly to do so), the Hemingway Defense goes something like this: as a writer, I am a very sensitive fellow, but I am also a man, and real men don't give in to their sensitivities. Only sissy-men do that. Therefore I drink. How else can I face the existential horror of it all and continue to work?

No me interesa la credibilidad, sino la libertad, y he descubierto que escribir puede proporcionarla.

You stole my story and something's got to be done about it.

Writing is no trouble: you just jot down ideas as they occur to you. The jotting is simplicity itself--it is the occurring which is difficult.

pages. He did not seek credit for the principles; he sought to teach the principles, to make them accessible.

Habit 1 says, "You are the programmer." Habit 2, then, says, "Write the program." Until you accept the idea that you are responsible, that you are the programmer, you won't really invest in writing the program.

Albert Einstein said there comes a time in life when you must stop reading other people's books and start writing your own.

When I write a book without a writing schedule, it is really a nightmare

Yeah, well, we're all writers, aren't we? He's a writer that hasn't been published, and I'm a writer who hasn't written anything.

Good prose is never written by a committee. A writer should revise in response to a comment when it comes from more than one reader or when it makes sense to the writer herself.

If you really want to improve the quality of your writing, or if you want to thunder about sins in the writing of others, the principles you should worry about the most are not the ones that govern fused participles and possessive antecedents but the ones that govern critical thinking and factual diligence.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

I love being an author. I love actual writing, and I love communicating with children. And it keeps me young.

I wrote my first book when I was 22 years old. I have a way with words and I love to write. I can write without getting writers block so I knew, it was a gift.

I love the writing. I love the idea of typing and seeing it on the computer and printing it out myself and, you know, moving sentences around. I like that.

I love to tell stories. I love to tell stories the way I tell them, not the way anybody else tells them. I am all the time writing a novel.

I love writing books - I really do. If I could just quit everything and work on a book every day, I would love that most.

I worship F. Scott Fitzgerald and I love his writing.

Nothing worse than reading a love scene written by your father.

I love writing. I don't claim to be great at it. Occasionally I get a good sentence off. But I love the activity.

What you should do when you're writing a book is you should have a question and it should be a real question. It should be one you don't know the answer to and then you should be studying and writing like mad and reading everything you can get your hands on to see if you can actually grapple with the problem and come to some solution and you should walk the reader as well through your process of thinking.