Quotes About Authorship

I have often been asked how I came to write. The best answer is that I needed the money. When I started I was 35 and had failed in every enterprise I had ever attempted.

I never exactly made a book. It's rather like taking dictation. I was given things to say.

Here's what I respect: creating something meaningful and then presenting it to the world,

Well, you just catch me where I go wrong," I shoot back, "but a Harvard education hasn't done much to get your little manuscript out to the world.

We all know funny people who can't get it down on the page - even funny writers who can't get it down on the page.

La verdad del escritor no coincide con la verdad de quienes reparten el oro.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

Aunque a ratos de olvides de mi, ingrato elctor, yo sigo manejando los hilos. Estoy al acecho detrás de las palabras y guío tus pasos -y también tus emociones- a través de esta historia. Pero sigo aquí y cuando me convenga apareceré, sin que tú puedas evitarlo.

I had been working hard at my book; it was one of those rare days of authorship when everything seemed to go right; the words flowed unbidden from my pen, and the time had passed unheeded, so that it was a shock to realise that I had been writing for some six hours.

another chapter of the same old story, written, still, by someone else's invisible hand.

So, really, this was all Ramirez's fault. (What can I say? Twelve years of Catholic school had taught me how to reassign guilt with the best of them.)

Sometimes I think my writing sounds like I walked out of the room and left the typewriter running.

The best way to become a successful writer is to read good writing, remember it, and then forget where you remember it from.

I write in the morning from about eight till noon, and sometimes again a bit in the afternoon. In the morning I start off by going over what I had done the previous day, which my wife has happily typed up for me.

O moral Gower, this book I directeTo the.

I would often rather read what a famous author has cut from one of his works than what he has let stand.

Nowadays three witty turns of phrase and a lie make a writer.

En cierta obra de un hombre célebre preferiría leer lo que tachó que lo que dejó.

The only literary men are those who have to work at it.

Yet on the other hand, I did manage to write, and without more than occasional repining, during my years of bondage, and I would not, as some unsatisfied writers do, blame my lack of productivity upon my lack of time.

What I will be remembered for are the Foundation Trilogy and the Three Laws of Robotics. What I want to be remembered for is no one book, or no dozen books. Any single thing I have written can be paralleled or even surpassed by something someone else has done. However, my total corpus for quantity, quality and variety can be duplicated by no one else. That is what I want to be remembered for.

Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.

January 1950, Doubleday published my first book, the science-fiction novel Pebble in the Sky, and I was hard at work on a second novel.

Nadie sabe para quién escribe. Cada libro es un mensaje lanzado en una botella al mar con la esperanza de que arribe a otra orilla.