Quotes About Authorship

I loved the writing process. I loved it.

One of the things is, in the writing process, if you do it enough, you have a sense of where you are. I didn't have that with the first book as I was writing it. Now, as I write books, I have a sense of where I am. Unfortunately, the sense of where I am is usually behind.

As for my writing process, there is one truth I have discovered after writing some twenty-plus books: Not every book is the same, but the middle of every book is where I really begin to question my choice of vocations. The beginning and end is usually fairly clear to me, but that middle just sucks the life right out of me.

Writers often like to talk about how intuitive the writing process is, but in truth, building a book is a remarkably unintuitive task. Or, to put it more accurately, you need a lot more than intuition. You need plot and characters. You need a setting. You need a theme that is relevant and supported by your text.

I write wherever I am. It helps that the writing process, for me, is a lone-wolf mission.

Nothing written for pay is worth printing. Only what has been written against the market.

I've written so many verses and keep on writing so many more that I became afraid that if I didn't write them into one big book, I might forget some of them.

The only imaginative fiction being written today is income tax returns.

If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, you must be the one to write it.

Nothing I had written before 'Mary Poppins' had anything to do with children, and I have always assumed, when I thought about it at all, that she had come out of the same wall of nothingness as the poetry, myth and legend that had absorbed me all my writing life.

This time all the historical details and things were right. But I'd written it again in third person, and people found it dry. I decided to throw that one away.

This is the sixth book I've written, which isn't bad for a guy who's only read two.

I would say just start writing. You've got to write every day. Copy someone that you like if you think that perhaps could become your sound, too. I did that with Hemingway, and I thought I was writing just like Hemingway. Then all of a sudden it occurred to me - he didn't have a sense of humor. I don't know anything he's written that's funny.

I've written original material before, where I've come up with the idea and the characters myself, and that's definitely very different to working with someone else's characters and stories.

Many of my books are written from a female perspective. I rather enjoy the take that women have on the world, and certainly I enjoy the conversations that women have.

Everything I have ever written has been in the same chair, in the same room.

I don't think I'm morbid by nature. Serious writers have always written about serious subjects. Lighthearted material doesn't appeal to me, and I don't read it. I think I'm a realist, with a realistic sensibility of history and the tragedy of history.

I hated writing 'Love Warrior.' It's the hardest thing I've every written. I cried.

I don't write all my stuff. Everybody always thinks that. But in just about every album I've ever had has been about 50-50 songs I've written or co-written and other people's songs.

I've certainly written a lot of things that have more or less come true. But I don't have a gift for prophecy.

'Scar Tissue' is the only book I've ever written when I've felt completely toxic, ill.

There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years.

We don't have to think up a title till we get the doggone book written.

Once I've written something it does tend to run away from me. I don't seem to have any part of it - it's no longer my piece of writing.