Quotes About Authorship

I'm as much my own master as anyone can be, without being the master of others. I can write anywhere - all I need is a couple of hours of solitude and a computer, and I can write a chapter. Since my work is portable, I can live anywhere I like.

At the age of seventeen, I decided I would spend my life writing fiction. I didn't know what this entailed, exactly - a room, I supposed. A room and books and paper and solitude.

Definitely, doing my solo stuff, it's fun in a different way. I get a lot more say. However, there's a lot more work to do because I have to make everything happen.

If I can write it, I can cope. And I've been writing many books, but in every book, I try to explore something in my own soul that I need to solve, I need to understand.

You're thinking about the physical consequences about what you're writing if you're going to direct it. If you're not going to direct it, then it's somebody else's problem, and they'll solve it.

I didn't publish my book until I was 37. So the ability to pay my bills, pay my rent, make a life for myself, and become a working writer was a puzzle that took me a while to solve.

You start at the end, and then go back and write and go that way. Not everyone does, but I do. Some people just sit down at the page and start off. I start from what happened, including the why.

The things I have sold to film, I've sold because I was happy to rent out the right to adapt those works. Some things, I haven't sold to film, because I was less interested in having no control over the adaptation.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

I keep working under the delusion that someday a library will ask for my manuscripts.

Now I say I'm a diarist with an explanation I'll get back to you on. Someday I may try and write in memoir form.

It's one thing you aspire to: someday, you'll be able to write a book.

I used the pen name because I knew I wanted to write better novels under my own name someday.

I never earned a dollar that was not somehow through writing.

I didn't know anything about writing a screenplay, but somehow I ended up rewriting a screenplay.

There are people out there who will not read books, but somehow they'll read my books.

At least for me, it takes more knowledge to write fiction than nonfiction. At least about someplace that I begin with a lot of ignorance about.

I live, love and loathe my characters. They stole my mind. They stole my heart.

I don't think with any book you get used to people falling in love with the story. It's been incredible just to realize your books are being read. It's a pretty amazing feeling.

Some of the people who hate me love some of the sentences that I have written, until they get to the name of the person to whom the sentences are attributed.

I have never thought that the man of Stratford-on-Avon wrote the plays of Shakespeare.

O esclarecimento só ocorre quando, além de saber o que o autor escreveu, você também sabe o que ele quis dizer com o que escreveu e por que escreveu o que escreveu.

Thus the most important thing to know, when reading any report of current happenings, is who is writing the report. What is involved here is not so much an acquaintance with the reporter himself as with the kind of mind he has.

RULE 4. FIND OUT WHAT THE AUTHOR'S PROBLEMS WERE.