Quotes About Authorship

Plagiarism is a crime of its first known definition, now lost and stolen.

Any writer, in whatever form, must first pass through the stage of being a reader. It is unimaginable that someone could become a writer without first being a reader. Only a daydreamer who had fallen into an unhealthy idealism could exoticize a writer in this way. Such misperception is similar to believing that thought is possible without language.

Dessy, don't grow up to be a writer. Because when you live too much in your own head, you neglect the people you love and become an insulated wack job.

I own every book Stephen King has ever written." "That's great. That's something to be proud of." But did you read them, fuckface?

She is such a writer that she puts words in my mouth while I'm standing right here, rewriting life in real time, and no, she can't do this to me, to us.

Dan Fox. (Son of Dan Brown and Paula Fox).

this book is almost inexcusably lengthy. For this I must apologize, with the excuse that I did not have time to make it shorter

As the lives of their characters develop, they end up on paths that writers could not possibly have foreseen—and hence give the impression of agency, even to their authors. William Blake wrote of his works "tho I call them Mine I know they are not Mine," and characterized his process of writing as a kind of dictation, "without Premeditation or even against my Will." Musicians sometimes speak in exactly the same way.

One hates an author that's all author.

We ourselves often duck responsibility for our own actions. Just think how much more embarrassed God would be if He were their author.

Taking something from one man and making it worse is plagiarism.

Even the people who have had success and made money writing these books of fiction seem to feel the need to pretend it's no big deal, or part of a natural progression from poetry to fiction, but often it's really just about the money, the perceived prestige.

I should write a book. I've always wanted to write a book. I should write a book about kids who see dead people.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

It is also true that one can write nothing readable unless one constantly struggles to efface one's own personality. Good prose is like a windowpane.

For a creative writer possession of the truth is less important than emotional sincerity.

Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.

Writing is like sausage making in my view; you'll all be happier in the end if you just eat the final product without knowing what's gone into it.

No one will be alive by the last book. In fact, they all die in the fifth. The sixth book will be just a thousand-page description of snow blowing across the graves ...

Yet, if he would not lie, what could he write but truth?

It's not a career for anyone who needs or values security. It's a career for gamblers. Every time you write a book you roll the dice again.

The Second World War broke out within a few months of the publication of Rehabilitations and The Personal Heresy. Jack was then a man of forty. He had published seven books, of which only two were moderately successful. No one could have guessed that within a few years his would become a household name.

I am, therefore I write.

If you do not seek to publish what you have written, then you are not a writer and you never will be.