Quotes About Authorship

Fare lo scrittore è diventato un mestiere come un altro; un mestiere in cui furbizia, abilità e capacità di offrirsi ai media spesso suppliscono la presenza di un vero talento.

Brevity in writing is what charity is to all other virtues — righteousness is nothing without the one, nor authorship without the other.

No wonder you want to be a writer. How can you not, with all that behind you? You practically are a novel already.

There are millions of people who think that romance isn't real writing. But the only person who can make you real, make your books real, is you.

Virginia Woolf helps. Her novels make mine possible.

Then I decided I would spend the summer writing a novel. That would fix a lot of people. […] A feeling of tenderness filled my heart. My heroine would be myself, only in disguise.

Perchè mi sento libera di scriverle [le parole]? La mia identità prende forma, si modella - sento che i racconti fioriscono mentre leggo la raccolta del New Yorker - sì, quanto i tempi saranno maturi, io sarò tra loro - le poetesse, le autrici.

I would spend my whole time writing on some obscure theme in the works of James Joyce.

Every writer owes something to Holmes. -- T.S. Eliot, in The Criterion, 1929

What profession is more trying than that of author? After you finish a piece of work it only seems good to you for a few weeks; or if it seems good at all you are convinced that it is the last you will be able to write; and if it seems bad you wonder whether everything you have done isn't poor stuff really; and it is one kind of agony while you are writing, and another kind when you aren't.

Literacy isn't just about reading, writing, and comprehension. It's about culture, professionalism, and social outlook.

Eating and sleeping are the two periods in your life where writers get a pass for not reading. Check that. Only sleeping.

Everything was really a story, penned or thought or acted out at some time by someone.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

Writing is my obsession, my passion. My relationship with it is one of the most complex and agonizing and richly vexing that I have in my life.

All good men are happy when they choose to be their own authors. Those who choose to have others edit their pathways, must live on the edge of another man's sword.

Whose book is it anyway? The hardest thing a writer has to learn is that once you publish a book, it's no longer truly yours – even though it's got your name on the front and it lives inside you. It belongs to the readers now. All you can do is steel yourself as you push it out into the world, stay gracious, and get busy with the next one.

Some people should be paid not to write another novel.

If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked, Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women. (Margaret Atwood)

She must have read Shaw's story a few years before. Yes, that must have been it. She had read the story and clearly enjoyed it, to the extent that she had copied it, verbatim, into a notebook reserved for that purpose. Then, finding an assignment due for my class, she had paged through said notebook, stumbled across Shaw's narrative, and forgotten that Shaw, rather than Tara Tappani, was its rightful author. A simple mix-up.

si hay alguna cosa que defiendo por mí mismo, por la escritura, por la literatura, por todos los escritores y por todos los lectores, es la soberana libertad de un escritor de escribir lo que su conciencia y su dignidad personal lo llevan a escribir.

No tiene familia, es un escritor.

One thing that worried me was how writers get categorized and so they end up having to write the same kind of book again and again. That is fine if it is what you want to do, but I would rather be locked in the trunk of my car with a weasel than write the same book every three years until I die.

It is hard not to write satire.