Quotes About Authorship

The biggest kick is reading something new and exciting and then getting other people to share your enthusiasm. Beyond all the cant and hypocrisy in publishing, that's what it's all about.

Many years ago... many, many years ago, I brought up a boy, and I said to him, 'Son, if you ever become a writer, try to write a good part for your old man sometime.' Well, by cracky, that's what he did!

I simply don't understand authors that know everything before they write it; it seems so cold blooded. I think it's lovely when the story takes over and goes somewhere else.

What I wish is that people would look beyond the tribbles and see I've written some other books that I really would like people to notice. There's 'The Man Who Folded Himself,' there's 'The Martian Child,' which is about my son and the adoption. There's 'The War Against The Chtorr,' which is my magnum opus, my great epic story.

I'm not an author, but as a songwriter, I'm afforded this kind of luxurious ambiguity in songs of being able to confess the secrets of my relationships with people and face basically no consequences, or ask for no approval or permission.

I try to write in the mornings, as soon as I'm up and caffeinated, and to stay in the chair as long as I can be productive.

Every book has an intrinsic impossibility, which its writer discovers as soon as his first excitement dwindles.

I loved to read when I was a kid, and as soon as I realized that an actual person got to make up the books I loved so much, I decided that that was the job for me.

It became plain very soon after our marriage that ours was to be a literary partnership.

Accepting that part of the process of writing is deleting a lot of what you write is soothing, at least to me.

It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.

In France, for instance, one magazine writer was convinced that On The Road had been a huge influence on Lost Souls and was crushed to learn that I hadn't read the one until after I'd written the other.

I worked from 10 p.m. until 1 a.m. every night for a year to write the first 'Chicken Soup for the Soul' book.

When I die there may be a paragraph or two in the newspapers. My name will linger in the British Museum Reading Room catalogue for a space at the head of a long list of books for which no one will ever ask.

At the moment, I'm toying with a new idea for a book, but fully engaged with writing screenplays, so the book idea - which needs empty space in my head - is barely formed yet.

I describe my works as books, but my publishers in Spain, in the United States, and elsewhere insist on calling them novels.

No one can command over the images of your mind but an Author can and if you won't believe on me then read my book.

Writing became such a process of discovery that I couldn't wait to get to work in the morning: I wanted to know what I was going to say. ~Sharon O'Brien

If you are going to write a book, Make sure it is going to be worth reading .

Don't let God be the co-author of your life.

Nothing goes by luck in composition. It allows of no tricks. The best you can write will be the best you are.

The problem of knowledge is that there are many more books on birds written by ornithologists than books on birds written by birds and books on ornithologists written by birds

is often a good career move for an author.

The appearance of busyness reinforces the perception of causality, of the link between results and one's role in them.