Quotes About Authorship

I am, in some sense, a writer. Even though I kinda downplay the word thing, I do enjoy writing sometimes.

I've always wanted to be a writer ever since I was in kindergarten, so that was ultimately what I wanted to do with my life.

I don't aspire at present to be king of the hill in American literature.

I wrote 'The Kiss' 12 hours a day for six months.

Very often, things that people may think come from the writer, very often don't. There's a lot of cooks in the kitchen when it comes to making a movie. When you hear a line of dialogue that sounds kind of tinny, it's pretty easy to cite the screenwriter. But there's a lot of stuff that goes into making a movie.

It's always easiest for me as a writer if I know I have a great ending. It can make everything else work. If you don't have a good ending, it's the hardest things in the world to come up with one. I always loved the ending of 'The Kite Runner,' and the scenes that are most faithful to the book are the last few scenes.

I made a deliberate choice to write something people would enjoy, not knock people out with 'Boy, he can really put a clause together!'

Any writer my age almost can't get away from being influenced by Kurt Vonnegut, partially because of his simple, clear way of stating things. To read Vonnegut is to learn how to use economy words.

Kurt Vonnegut and I - it's not an exaggeration to say we were best friends. And I grew up just idolizing him.

I base a lot of decisions on my gut, and going with an independent label was a good one.

Every author these days is an award-winning novelist. Why? Because they set up an award contest and they dub themselves the winner.

I like to edit my sentences as I write them. I rearrange a sentence many times before moving on to the next one. For me, that editing process feels like a form of play, like a puzzle that needs solving, and it's one of the most satisfying parts of writing.

I haven't even read everything I wrote.

There are two kinds of writers, those who are and those who aren't. With the first, content and form belong together like soul and body; with the second, they match each other like body and clothes.

A writer is someone who can make a riddle out of an answer.

I've always loved books. I was an avid reader, with any number of my own stories rolling around in my head. Writing them down seemed a logical step.

The reader, however, is warned not to be too sure that the author of any quotation had in mind the subject to which it is applied here.

But when The Prince of Tides came out, thank God she was dead. I'm not sure I would have had the guts to publish that with her still alive.

Is a twist less satisfying if you know it's coming? Is a twist that you can't predict symptomatic of bad construction? These are things to consider when writing.

The day my father shook my hand, I knew I was a writer.

Imagine getting to be one of those people who actually gets paid to talk about literature. He'd do this for free, not that he wants his publisher to know that.

Why do you keep reading a book? Usually to find out what happens. Why do you give up and stop reading it? There may be lots of reasons. But often the answer is you don't care what happens. So what makes the difference between caring and not caring? The author's cruelty. And the reader's sympathy...it takes a mean author to write a good story.

Whatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word.

Since it was announced that I had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the Chinese Foreign Ministry has condemned my works and criticized them harshly. All of my works are now banned from getting into China or being published in China. What author would want to return to a country that banned his or her books?