Quotes About Authorship

I wrote in the book very specifically what I wanted to write about, period, and left it at.

With the Truman book, I wrote the entire account of his experiences in World War I before going over to Europe to follow his tracks in the war. When I got there, there was a certain satisfaction in finding I had it right - it does look like that.

Although Bill Finger literally typed the scripts in the early days, he wrote the scripts from ideas that we mutually collaborated on. Many of the unique concepts and story twists also came from my own fertile imagination.

Once I was condemned to three months' absolute silence. As I could not speak, I wrote a book.

In 1999, I had my back against the wall, and WWE had a ghostwriter working on an autobiography for me. He was halfway through, and it was awful, just boring. I took over as a way of trying to fix things, as I thought I could probably do a better job.

Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn't the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn't have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I'd got now for an 'adult' DW.

I've always wanted to be a part of that experience of writing to an audience that is just starting to fall in love with books. When I felt that my writing for adults had become cemented, I decided to write a YA series.

I write the story as it comes to me - YA is my natural voice, not a conscious choice.

My first YA novel, not many people have read. It's a fickle business. There's a degree of timing and luck involved.

Initially, I wanted to write middle grade. YA scared me: there's a lot of responsibility in being a YA author. It's so important to give that age range the right books that reflect their world and show them themselves.

I wanted to live the life my characters were living, so I rented a yacht and sailed from Naples to Capri before taking a helicopter back. Got to write the whole thing off as research on my taxes.

I write longhand; I make changes longhand, and I have an assistant who types it up. She lives 70 yards away. Every afternoon, I have a case I leave out on the porch, and she brings it back the next morning.

I can tell from about 20 yards away when someone has a manuscript for me. I can just tell - they have that look.

My first duty to write a gripping yarn. Second is to convey credible characters who make you feel what they feel. Only third comes the idea.

There was a time before I felt I was a real writer, when I was a yarn spinner and I just wanted to tell story until it was over. But then there came a time where I was like, 'No, I want to understand something through writing this that I might have not understood before. I want people to come away with something to think about.'

Yeah, I loved Ray Bradbury.

After an author has been dead for some time, it becomes increasingly difficult for his publishers to get a new book out of him each year.

You're always told by your publisher that you must only write one book a year and some years you should perhaps write none at all.

I can't write a book like 'Lamb' or 'Fool' every year. It just takes too much research and craft.

Sometimes that's a year, sometimes it's 18 months, where all I'm doing is taking notes. I'm reconstructing the story from the back to the front so that I know where the front is.

I write four books a year. I'm very fortunate that I write quickly; around 3,500 words a day. Being strict about delineating my writing time and personal life, as well as keeping distractions at bay, is the only way I can accomplish this.

Hoping to instill my love of learning in other children, I taught my first class at a local elementary school the year my first book, 'Flying Fingers,' debuted; since then, I have spoken at hundreds of schools, classrooms and conferences around the world.

If you imagine writing 1,000 words a day, which most journalists do, that would be a very long book a year. I don't manage nearly that... but I have published slightly too much recently.

If you want to publish two books a year under your own name and your publisher doesn't, maybe you need a different publisher.