Quotes About Authorship

I could never be the kind of writer who went to the set of the movie and fussed and fretted about, 'Oh, that dialogue's wrong,' or 'That character doesn't look like that.' That would be insufferable.

Watching well-meaning authors follow in the footsteps of someone going in the wrong direction breaks my heart.

For a lot of people, becoming an author is a change in occupation... they are coming from something that totally has nothing to do with this. If they are expecting to come into a room full of people praising them, then they are in the wrong place.

When you are a sentence-based writer, they have to be good. They have to be really on the spot. Because when you don't have a plot, really, what shall you rely on? Just language. And sometimes I am so afraid of writing the wrong thing, I just sit and wait for the right thing to come.

Most important of all, there is no right or wrong way to write - there's only what works for you. I was taught to write every day, but I know a writer (a bestseller at that!) who only writes on weekends.

Two wrongs may not make a right, but a thousand wrongs make a writer.

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

As a teenager I wrote to R.A. Lafferty. And he responded, too, with letters that were like R.A. Lafferty short stories, filled with elliptical answers to straight questions and simple answers to complicated ones.

All my editors since Malcolm Cowley have had instructions to leave my prose exactly as I wrote it. In the days of Malcolm Cowley, with 'On the Road' and 'The Dharma Bums', I had no power to stand by my style for better or for worse.

This book was company for me - I wrote these things when I was in hotels, far from where I normally live. I never intended to publish it.

Tricker the Squirrel is the best piece I ever wrote. It's intricate.

I wrote 'Time Stops at Shamli' in 1956, shortly after 'The Room on the Roof' was published, and I couldn't find anyone to publish it.

There are stories still in existence that I wrote when I was five. However, I did not get published until I was seven.

I always wrote; my first story was published in the magazine The American Girl when I was 11.

As soon as I began, it seemed impossible to write fast enough - I wrote faster than I would write a letter - two thousand to three thousand words in a morning, and I cannot help it.

No writer of a portion of the Bible was perfect. It was the direct and miraculous operation of the Holy Spirit that what they wrote is without mistake.

Most people believe that the Creator of the universe wrote (or dictated) one of their books. Unfortunately, there are many books that pretend to divine authorship, and each makes incompatible claims about how we all must live.

I started to write in 2001. I wrote the books for the fun of it. It was an old idea I had had since the nineties.

One night, I just woke up and I went, 'Killing Jesus.' And I believe, because I'm a Catholic, that comes from the Holy Spirit. My inspiration comes from that. And so I wrote 'Killing Jesus' because I think I was directed to write that.

Well, writing was what I wanted to do, it was always what I wanted to do. I had novels to write so I wrote them.

Indeed, I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

When I wrote 'Lord of the Flies' - I had no idea it would even get published.

It came about as follows: over the years when I was involved in dianetics, I wrote the beginnings of many stories. I would get an idea, and then write the beginning, and then never touch it again.

I only published my first novel at the age of 40. Till then, I wrote short stories.