Quotes About Authorship

As a writer, you get to play, you get to alter time, you get to come up with the smart lines and the clever comebacks you wish you'd thought of.

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

In a story you only had to wish, you only had to write it down and you could have the world.

Each day he made attempts … but produced nothing but quotations, thinly or well disguised, of his own work. Nothing sprang free of its own idiom, its own authority, to offer the element of surprise that would be the guarantee of originality.

devised; then came the problems of success itself, unbelievable sales, new production quotas

Como pode uma escritora expiar os seus pecados se, com o poder absoluto de decidir o final, é em certa medida Deus? Não há ninguém, nenhuma entidade, nenhum ser superior a quem ela possa apelar, com quem possa reconciliar-se ou que possa perdoar-lhe.

She had never lost that childhood pleasure in seeing pages covered in her own handwriting.

Finally, thank you very much to Jeaniene Frost and Jill Myles. This book does have sex in it. Please don't hit me anymore. ~Ilona Andrews in the Acknowledgements section of Magic Bleeds

With my first book, 'A Letter to a Young Brother,' I figured it would be my only book I was ever going to write. What happened with that is a lot of young men would reach out to me.

I won't usually just sit down to write. I'd have done it in my head already. I visualise a story just like a film strip running in my head. I guess that is also a reason why my books have such a visual element to them. And it's what I tell young writers: plan your story ahead.

There's no path to being a writer that's applicable to everyone. Some young writers have the fortitude to work in a vacuum. For me, it was important to have some sense that my failures weren't unique.

A lot of young writers ask me about my process. They know what they want to write - but they need to know how. What's the right way? How do the professionals do it? What's the secret?

I have always discouraged young writers from self-publishing, by which I mean going to a vanity publisher and spending your hard earned savings - say, some two-three lakhs - and getting your book printed. It's not published; it's printed!

The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers... but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds.

As a youngster, I think I said I wanted to be a journalist, but that's a disguise for being a writer.

It's wonderful to be able to have such wildly different projects in your body of work. They don't feel different to me as I'm working on them. It feels like they all share this element of subversiveness and finding the joy in subversiveness.

When you write a movie, you have a hundred collaborators. But when you write a novel, it's yours.

Save yourself some grief. Check with the publicist you hire to see what other books he/she has coming out at the same time as yours.

As a self-published author, you have the choice. Embrace the power to create a book that is truly yours. Don't be a whiner or a copycat.

When I was first offered the book deal, I was like, 'I am not a writer. I haven't practiced this.' My approach has been completely stream-of-consciousness, and then edit down, because that's been YouTube for me forever.

The nice thing about being a writer is that you can make magic happen without learning tricks.

They were a very good form for me - the way a short story has to be designed in order to function, to get in everything it needs to - and they tend to be absolutely chock-a-block full of mechanisms and tricks that writers use to do the things they need to and have the effects they need to have.

I'm a storyteller... I haves a God-given gift that I can share with you and perhaps entertain you and bring you along for the ride... So when anybody tries to take that away from me, or impede that, I get defensive.

Writing is an incredibly creatively empowering experience for me. It is the place where nobody tries to control what I'm doing.