Quotes About Authorship

If today I were to counsel a young writer who is still unsure of his way, I would try to persuade him first to adapt or translate a sizable work. In all sacrificing service there is more assurance for the beginner than in his own creation, and nothing that one has ever done with devotion is done in vain.

Once your writing is out there, you can't control how other people perceive it. All you can do is stand in your truth.

There is one straight chain of truth without one heretical sentence in that which I have written.

If you only write when inspired, you may be a fairly decent poet, but you'll never be a novelist.

The truth is, it's not a great career move to create a readership and then, in effect, abandon them.

The truth is that when you're writing a novel you're really living in it; you're living in the house, and you're living in the town.

There is a big part of me that has a writer's sensibility. And so that's how I think. That's how I pursue truth. That's how I hope to communicate truth to people.

...With stories even a page can take me hours, but the truth seems to flow out as fast as I can get it down.

The truth is, writing and directing are two very different jobs. They're not even remotely the same job. It took me a while, as a director, to understand that.

I did try very hard to tell the whole truth without violating my literary instincts.

My poems getting published in Russia doesn't make me feel in any fashion, to tell you the truth. I'm not trying to be coy, but it doesn't tickle my ego.

Truth is, every writer has to be a good editor, and you have to edit yourself. It's a skill every writer has to acquire.

In writing, I shall always confine myself strictly to the truth, except when it is attended with inconvenience.

One of the paradoxes of writing is that when you write non-fiction everyone tries to prove that it's wrong, and when you publish fiction, everyone tries to see the truth in it.

Things evidently false are not only printed, but many things of truth most falsely set forth.

When you grow up to be an author and write books, you'll think you're making the books up, but they'll all really be true, somewhere.

For authors, the shortest distance between two points is a straight line only if you are writing the letter I.

I write it, you read it, we share the joy.

Michael Chabon

until after we publish.

Inevitably, you react to your own work—you like it, you don't like it, you think it's interesting or boring—and it is difficult to accept that those reactions may be unreliable. In my experience, they are. I mistrust either wild enthusiasm or deep depression. I have had the best success with material that I was sort of neutral about …

A writer's greatest challenge, though, is tone. I like a piece to sound as if it were dashed off in 15 minutes -- even when hours might have been spent in contriving just the right degree of airiness and nonchalance.

Es ist komisch. Es gibt einen Moment, wo man mit seinen Figuren nicht mehr machen kann, was man will, wo die eine Art Eigenleben kriegen und man eigentlich nur noch hinter ihnen hinterherschreiben muss. Und das ist ein gutes Zeichen, wenn dieser Punkt erreicht ist. Weil das heißt, dass die Figur wirklich ein Leben gekriegt hat.

Tutto ciò che accade tu lo scrivi disse. Tutto ciò che io scrive, accade fu la risposta.