Quotes About Authorship

Shakespeare wrote Moby-Dick, using Melville as a Ouija board.

You can't ever have my books.

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.

Authors, full of evil thoughts, lock up your typewriters.

I do not use my intellect to write my stories and books; I have a gut reaction to the things that my subconscious gives me.

I had no way to stop . I did not write Fahrenheit 451, it wrote me.

So here, after fifty years, is Fahrenheit 451. I didn't know what I was doing, but I'm glad that it was done.

And I thought about books. And for the first time I realized that a man was behind each one of the books. A man had to think them up. A man had to take a long time to put them down on paper. And I'd never even thought that thought before. He got out of bed. It took some man a lifetime maybe to put some of his thoughts down, looking at the world and life.

Y por primera vez comprendí que detrás de cada libro hay un hombre. Un hombre que tuvo que pensarlo. Un hombre que empleó mucho tiempo en llevarlo al papel.

The stories, the plays, were born in a yelping litter. I had but to get out of their way.

Liberty of imagination should be the most precious possession of a novelist. To try voluntarily to discover the fettering dogmas of its own inspiration, is a trick worthy of humna perverseness which, after inventing an absurdity, endeavours to find for it a pedigree of distinguished ancestors...

To be in the middle of composing a book is almost always to feel oneself in a state of confusion, doubt and mental imprisonment....

May through to June I spent my time deciding how to spend my time, which is the first, second, and third through nine thousand seven hundred and griftyfifth items on the agenda of every writer, or neurotic. I was getting ahead of myself, fretting whether the book would have to have notes or sources cited, fretting whether I'd be allowed to decide anything at all.

For writing is a solitary occupation, and one of its hazards is loneliness. But an advantage of loneliness is privacy, autonomy, freedom.

Anything that happens to me as a writer has been precipitated by an action of my own.

Joyce Carol Oates

I still remember typing the title page on my manual Smith-Corona with clammy hands and a racing heart. When I came to the words, A novel by Joyce Elbert, I heard the New York Philharmonic break into Wagnerian praise for a major new literary voice, yet seconds later doubt and insecurity had crept in.

If books could kill, I would have written more of them before I died.

Judy Blume spent her childhood in Elizabeth, New Jersey, making up stories inside her head. She has spent her adult years in many places, doing the same thing, only now she writes her stories down on paper. Her twenty-seven books have won many awards, including the National Book Foundation's Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Judy lives in Key West and New

Grub Street turns out good things almost as often as Parnassus. For if a writer is hard up enough, if he's far down enough (down where I have been and am rising from, I am really saying), he can't afford self-doubt and he can't let other people's opinions, even a father's, keep him from writing.

Bei einem Dichter klauen ist Diebstahl, bei vielen Dichtern klauen ist Recherche

Bücher erschaffen kannst du noch nicht", sagte der Schattenkönig, "aber umbringen kannst du sie schon. Bist du sicher, daß du nicht lieber Kritiker werden möchtest?

Dicke Bücher sind deswegen dick, weil der Autor nicht die Zeit hatte sich kurz zu fassen.

Writers are there to write, not experience things. If you want to experience things, become a pirate or a Bookhunter. If you want to write, write. If you can't find the makings of a story inside yourself, you won't find them anywhere.