Quotes About Authorship

A young writer is easily tempted by the allusive and ethereal and ironic and reflective, but the declarative is at the bottom of most good writing.

There's immense fun to be had as long as you can sort of sneak it past DC. I have been told on occasion that I need to have more respect for these characters.

Stories continue in all directions to include even the retelling of the stories themselves, as legend is informed by interpretation, and interpretation is informed by time.

When life happens, you can be either the author of your life or the victim of it. Those are your only two choices—accountable or unaccountable. This may sound harsh, but it's true. Every day we choose one approach or the other, and the consequences follow us forever.

Someone once said that if you steal from one writer, it's called plagiarism, but if you steal from several, it's called research. So steal from everybody, but steal only a sentence or a phrase at a time. If you use much more than that, you must get permission and then give credit.

Writing is] a trade [or]...a means of livelihood. You pass your imagination through the ink bottle, and it comes out in the shape of bread and meat, coats and shoes. [Julian Hawthorne]

I write because there is nothing as joyful as writing, even when the writing is twisted and full of hate, the self-hate that makes writing not only possible but necessary. I hate myself, I hate the people around me, but what I crave is the fulfillment of some ideal.

Aha! Today I shall become an author! And I will auth and auth and auth and make a squillion dollars, whoopee!

You don't need any expert's permission to write your story, your way.

But his life consisted, for the most part, of writing and reading. He wrote during the day, read at night, went to bed early, and did the same thing the next day.

Writers don't own their words. Since when do words belong to anybody. "Your very own words," indeed ! And who are you?

If you don't like my book, write your own.... If you do like my novels, I commend your good taste.

I have no pleasure in writing myself--none, in the mere act--though all pleasure in the sense of fulfilling a duty, whence, if I have done my real best, judge how heart-breaking a matter must it be to be pronounced a poor creature by critic this and acquaintance the other.

We're writers, the people hired for their imaginations.

How can I write a book? you might say. I've got nothing to say. Don't let that stop you. Very few writers have anything to say. The trick is to see how long you can conceal that from the reader. The most successful writers are ones who've been able to get away with it for the greatest number of pages and years.

Thus for Michael Foucault, a leading postmodernist writer, "truth" is the result of power-relationships that masquerade as neutral means of enforcing order.

By stating what a text means, placing that truth where it originates in the text, and proving how the text establishes that truth, you fulfill the fundamental obligations of an expositor: State what you know and show how you know.

1975 was International Women's Year. I had never heard the word 'feminism' before then. I was writing my books from the experiences of my own life and from watching and studying the lives of those around me in general. I did not know that writing the way I was, was putting me into a special category. I had the first inkling of it on 28 June 1975 when the International Women's League invited me to give a speech.

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It would be better not to know how to write. Then one would not have to sign death sentences."16

My husbands hated it when I wrote cos I used to kill myself laughing. I was so funny. They couldn't stand that it was so easy for me. Cosmo says I wrote in a trance. I'd sit down, black out and an hour or so later two-and-a-half thousand words would be there.

What's the use of elaborating what, in its very essence, is so short-lived as a modern book. Though I wrote the Gospels in this century, I should die in the gutter.

Would that all excellent books were foundlings, without father or mother, that so it might be, we could glorify them, without including their ostensible authors.

But anyhow, when you take up your pen you do something devilish pleasing: there is a prospect before you. You are going to develop a germ: I don't know what it is, and I promise you I won't call it creation—but possibly a god is creating through you, and at least you are making believe at creation. Anyhow, it is a sense of mastery and of origin, and you know that when you have done, something will be added to the world, and little destroyed.