Quotes About Authorship

The quality which makes man want to write and be read is essentially a desire for self-exposure and masochism. Like one of those guys who has a compulsion to take his thing out and show it on the street.

The precise metaphysical procedures by which a book goes about writing another book need not concern us here. Suffice to say that our human scribes remain entirely ignorant of their possession by bibliographic forces; the agent in question never doubts that his authorship is authentic.

I would say that fiction is something you write in spite of the research that you've done, not because the research you've done.

And yet Curt's a real writer too. His machinery is stuck, that's all.

The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it's time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book.

Es ist noch kein Buch

[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.

Smith elaborated on this a year later in a book, Bacon and Shakespeare, which claimed, among other things, that the plays were meant to be read, not staged;

Yankee Lady, sent by Emerson, who has discovered that the 'Man Shakespear' is a Myth, and did not write those plays that bear his name, which were on the contrary written by a 'Secret Associate' (names unknown): she has actually come to England for the purposes of examining that, and if possible, proving it … Ach Gott!

I came home from work one day and felt compelled to write a book about free will.

There is a difference between fiction and nonfiction deeper than technique or intention. I value both but genuinely believe that fiction can tell a larger truth.

I might not have ever had the courage to write those stories without that experience, that training ground in how to look at one's own life and see it as a story.

The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to write; surely one can only write the book that is there to be written. ( Letter to Muriel St. Clare Byrne , 8 September 1935)

Our speculations about Shakespeare are almost as multifarious and foolish as our speculations about the maker of the universe, and, like those, are frequently concerned to establish that his works were not made by him but by another person of the same name.

After all, it isn't really difficult to write books. Especially if you either write a rotten story in good English or a good story in rotten English, which is as far as most people seem to get nowadays.

Harriet laughed, remembering suddenly that a novelist owes a duty to her newspaper reporters.

This, she felt, was her fault. Her idea in the first place. Her house. Her honeymoon. Her – and this was the incalculable factor in the thing – her husband. (A repressive word, that, when you came to think of it, compounded of a grumble and a thump.) The

So, you're the man who can't spell 'fuck.' Dorothy Parker to Norman Mailer after publishers had convinced Mailer to replace the word with a euphemism, 'fug,' in his 1948 book, The Naked and the Dead.

On Oscar Wilde:] If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it. [ Life Magazine, June 2, 1927]

It takes me six months to do a story. I think it out and then write it sentence by sentence - no first draft. I can't write five words but that I change seven.

I hate writing, but I love having written.

The hotel shop only had two decent books, and I'd written both of them

The fact is, I don't know where my ideas come from. Nor does any writer. The only real answer is to drink way too much coffee and buy yourself a desk that doesn't collapse when you beat your head against it.

Dirk Gently is the name under which I now trade. There are certain events in the past, I'm afraid, from which I would wish to disassociate myself. Absolutely, I know how you feel. Most of the fourteenth century, for instance, was pretty grim, agreed Reg earnestly.