Quotes About Authorship

When I write, I write because a thing has to be done. I don't think a writer should meddle too much with his own work. He should let the work write itself.

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A novel is like a sausage. You might like the final taste, but you probably don't want to see how it was made.

The explanations a writer gives himself for having written any particular book are more often not the real reasons why that book has been written. Honesty is not the issue. Understanding is. A man does not write one novel at a time or even one quatrain at a time. He is engaged in the long process of putting his whole life on paper. He is on a journey and he is reporting in: 'This is where I think I am and this is what this place looks like today.'" The

Pipe down cunt

The creator of Sir John Falstaff, of Hamlet, and of Rosalind also makes me wish I could be more myself. But that, as I argue throughout this book, is why we should read, and why we should read only the best of what has been written.

BLOOM: As far as I'm concerned, computers have as much to do with literature as space travel, perhaps much less. I can only write with a ballpoint pen, with a Rolling Writer, they're called, a black Rolling Writer on a lined yellow legal pad on a certain kind of clipboard. And then someone else types it. INTERVIEWER: And someone else edits? BLOOM: No one edits. I edit. I refuse to be edited.

My introduction, implicitly echoing Oscar Wilde's remark that all bad poetry is sincere, grants the benign social decency of [Stephen] King's fictions.

Canonical writing is born of an originality fused with tradition. – From the book jacket

You cannot locate Shakespeare in his own works, not even in the sonnets. It is in this near invisibility that encourages the zealots who believe that almost anyone wrote Shakespeare, except Shakespeare himself.

I have received many nasty letters from neo-conservatives, who denounce me because I refuse to say that the function of studying canonical works is to reinforce our moral suppositions.

Saint-Beuve, para mí el más interesante de los críticos franceses, nos enseñó a hacernos una pregunta crucial acerca de cualquier escritor al que leemos a fondo: ¿Qué piensa el autor de nosotros?

I would advise anyone who aspires to a writing career that before developing his talent he would be wise to develop a thick hide. [ Writer's Digest , September 1961]

Recorded history's version does not coincide with the truth, but these are the facts, because they were passed down by word of mouth through the years, and every Maycombian knows them.

Oh dear me, yes. The novel must tell a story.

Any writer worth his salt writes to please himself.

To be a serious writer requires discipline that is iron fisted. It's sitting down and doing it, whether you think you have it in you or not. Every day.

Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they're quite different from people who must write. From a 1964 interview.

Writing is a process of self-discipline you must learn before you can call yourself a writer. There are people who write, but I think they're quite different from people who must write. From a 1964 interview.

It's just like Yeats said. In dreams begin responsibilities. Flip this around and you could say that where there's no power to imagine, no responsibility can arise.

I read them in the intervals between study and play with an ever-deepening sense of pleasure. I did not study nor analyze them—I did not know whether they were well written or not; I never thought about style or authorship. They laid their treasures at my feet, and I accepted them as we accept the sunshine and the love of our friends.

I write the last line, and then I write the line before that. I find myself writing backwards for a while, until I have a solid sense of how that ending sounds and feels. You have to know what your voice sounds like at the end of the story, because it tells you how to sound when you begin.

I don't have a writer's room. I write all the shows myself. Ninety-one episodes a season, I'm sitting there at the computer writing and writing and writing because I want the voice to be authentic so that the audience is hearing from me and not other writers.

Writing's just as natural to me as getting up and cooking breakfast.