Quotes About Authorship

The experience of writing under a pseudonym was tremendously liberating; I could write what I wanted.

I may not have become a good writer, but I managed to make a living out of writing.

Writing fiction, I really just sit there and it just comes.

My stories run up and bite me on the leg - I respond by writing down everything that goes on during the bite. When I finish, the idea lets go and runs off.

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

I feel sorry for people who have to edit me. Which is why book writing is by far the most enjoyable. Really the only thing it's based on is whether it's good or not. No book editor, in my experience, is getting a manuscript and try to rewrite it.

It helps to be able to be alone. 'Cuz writing is done alone, unless you collaborate, but I don't do that. Ask my ex-wife.

The odd thing about being a writer is you do tend to lose yourself in your books. Sometimes it seems like real life is flickering by and you're hardly a part of it. You remember the events in your books better than you remember the events that actually took place when you were writing them.

When I'm writing fiction I'm thinking, God, this is so hard - I have to make all this stuff up! I wish I were writing a nonfiction book where all the facts are laid out and I don't have to be so much at sea.

I'm dependent on writing for a living, so really it's to my advantage to understand how the creative process works. One of the problems is, when you start to do that, in effect you're going to have to step off the edge of science and rationality.

I always wanted to be a writer. Maybe, had I been brought up in another generation, I might have just gone into writing rather than medicine - which is not to say that I didn't also have a great attraction towards the idea of being a healer. Fortunately, I've been able to combine the two in ways I could never possibly have imagined.

When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don't mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It's the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.

After you finish a book, you know, you're dead. But no one knows you're dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

With due apologies to Shakespeare, some people are born writers, some people achieve it after a lot of hard work, some people have a writing career thrust upon them. I am in that last group.

perhaps the most acute source of happiness from writing was the happiness of expressing a very complicated idea–the kind of idea that takes hundreds of pages to capture.

Whenever I start a new book, I think, "This is the most interesting subject of all time. It's sad, I'll never enjoy writing another book as much as I enjoy this one." Every time, I'm convinced. And then I change my mind when I start the next book.

An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.

Come, let's be calm: no one incapable of restraint was ever a writer.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your imagination and make them pop like chestnuts.

it is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

je ne serai jamais qu'un écrivailleur honni, un vaniteux misérable. // l shall never be anything but a despised scribbler, a poor conceited fool.

As to texts, look at history; it, is known that all the texts have been falsified by the Jesuits.

It is a delicious thing to write, to be no longer yourself, but to move in an entire universe of your own creation.

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