Quotes About Authorship

It's a trifle hard to surprise yourself with a story you've written.

I do not love to be printed on every occasion, much less to be dunned and teased by foreigners about mathematical things or to be thought by our own people to be trifling away my time about them when I should be about the king's business.

I devote most of my day to writing, and try to turn out at least four pages a day. As for what triggers the creative process, it's a mystery to me! Characters often just walk on the page, and I wait to see what they do and say while I'm writing them.

Nowadays it seems as though people sit down to write what they know is going to be a trilogy.

I thought 'UnSouled' would come in at around 400 pages, but it took 650 pages, and even then I felt like I was rushing the conclusion, so I asked my editor and publisher if I could divide it again. So a sequel became a trilogy, and the trilogy became a tetralogy - although we're not calling it that.

Even if you are lucky enough to sell a trilogy, you don't know if you'll ever get to write that whole trilogy. I have many friends who had very long arcs planned in multi-book series that they never got to write because the first book didn't perform.

I have met so many people who say they've got a book in them, but they've never written a word. To be a writer - this may seem trite, I realize - you have to actually write.

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over world-building.

I do have trouble with titles.

I always have trouble with titles for my books. I usually have no title until the editor has to present the book and calls me frantically, 'Judy, we need a title.'

Writers are troubled about finding time to write and writer's block and publicizing books that aren't books yet. They agonize over how to write and what to write and what not to write.

It took seventeen years to get from my second novel, 'Truck,' to my third, 'Geek Love.'

Originality is the essence of true scholarship. Creativity is the soul of the true scholar.

My true nature, I believe, is writing.

I think my goal is to find a way to spend all of my time writing. I mean, sort of; true success is I'm doing nothing but writing if I do my job correctly.

My truest passion is writing, so I continue to do that on my own while seeing what all the buzz is about being in front of the camera.

I want to write books that can truly become a legacy and bring benefits to people.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

I realize now I could have gotten a whole book out of that and so I think that was a big mistake. But the truth is you write in the moment and with your head down and there is no way back then that I could have conceived of Harry having the longevity that he has had.

The truth is that every writer, whether it's fiction or nonfiction, is trying to write something truly original and that's what I think I'm doing.

No one person is the author of a Bourne film. The truth is it's a coalition of people who share the same vision for Bourne and his world, and we... its remarkably collaborative and collective.

The gamble of literature is that I make the best work I can; the most truthful, the most representative of how I see things. I try and do that, and then I put it out there and say to you, 'What do you think?' I hope that you think well of it, obviously.

I don't like outlining, because books are organic things. Sometimes a book doesn't want to be written in a certain way.

Despite the fact that I had a writing background, they didn't want to accept whatever ideas I had as a writer.