Quotes About Authorship

The rights of copyright holders need to be protected, but some draconian remedies that have been suggested would create more problems than they would solve.

My agent, Jeff Andrews, suggested I write a book. For some reason. he doesn't like it when I'm not doing anything.

I absolutely don't write for women - far, far from it. It's so not what I want to do. Some of the writers, who have helped out at the beginning and end of the process - they're all men - have suggested quite feminine subjects they want me to explore. And I'm always, simply, 'No.' I don't want to do diets, don't want to. I just can't do it.

I'm an author who likes assignments, who needs suggestions, ideas I would never have thought of otherwise - then something happens inside my alien head. Other people have to decide whether or not I'm a good writer, but I do have the ability to write in different styles.

After writing each novel, I would spend days poring over suggestions from my editor.

If you want your writing to be taken seriously, don't marry and have kids, and above all, don't die. But if you have to die, commit suicide. They approve of that.

Critics? How do they happen? I know how it happened to me. I would send a poem or story to a magazine and they would say this doesn't suit our needs precisely but on the other hand you sound interesting. Would you be interested in doing a review?

As a rule, I am lazy and prefer to avoid anything resembling work, and research feels like work, as opposed to my strong suit, which is sitting around making things up.

A writer's life suits me. It's fairly, well, other people might think it was actually rather dull, but that's fine because I feel that my imagination is enough to kind of keep me happy.

I write at a pace that suits me, and sometimes it's two books a year, but most often it's one.

In the summer of '80, Silhouette bought my first book.

I spent a whole summer working on what proved to be 'A Game of Thrones'.

I envisioned that as my life: staying in academia to make a living and then taking summers off to write my novels.

I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives.

Typically, a book is published and gets one season in the sun. Eventually, you write another book, and maybe your old books get a bump, but my books seem to keep being discovered and recommended to new people of all ages.

When women do take on traditionally male subjects, certain male colleagues can seem affronted that a woman has dared to trespass on their subject. I could given you dozens of examples, but here's one: Max Hastings's review in the 'Sunday Times' in 2009 of Miranda Carter's book 'The Three Emperors'.

But I decline to say who has ever listened to them, who has written them, or other people who have sung them.

By and large, the critics and readers gave me an affirmed sense of my identity as a writer. You might know this within yourself, but to have it affirmed by others is of utmost importance. Writing is, after all, a form of communication.

All writing comes by the grace of God.

It could be said that a single person has written all the books in the world such central unity is in them that they are undeniably the work of a single all-knowing master.

I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.

Better that the book should be not quite so good, and the writer better, and not himself a ridiculous contrast to all he has written.

Write a thousand words a day and in three years you'll be a writer!

I sometimes get up at night when I can't sleep and walk down into my library and open one of my books and read a paragraph and say, 'My God, did I write that?