Quotes About Authorship

We are the products of editing, rather than authorship.

It is by sitting down to write every morning that one becomes a writer.

A writer is rarely so well inspired as when he talks about himself.

Were the offer made true, I would engage to run again, from beginning to end, the same career of life. All I would ask should be the privilege of an author, to correct, in a second edition, certain errors of the first.

It has come to be practically a sort of rule in literature that a man, having once shown himself capable of original writing, is entitled thenceforth to steal from the writings of others at discretion.

I read my own books sometimes to cheer me when it is hard to write, and then I remember that it was always difficult, and how nearly impossible it was sometimes.

Life is a narrative that you have a hand in writing.

I feel successful when the writing goes well. This lasts five minutes. Once, when I was on the bestseller list, I also felt successful. That lasted three minutes.

They lard their lean books with the fat of others' works.

When Shakespeare is charged with debts to his authors, Landor replies, "Yet he was more original than his originals. He breathed upon dead bodies and brought them into life."

There's no right way of writing. There's only your way.

I am a writer because writing is the thing I do best.

When ideas come, I write them; when they don't come, I don't.

I never thought of myself as a writer, but the simplest thing seemed to be to put a piece of paper in the roller and start typing.

I wrote for twelve years and collected 250 rejection slips before getting any fiction published, so I guess outside reinforcement isn't all that important to me.

Miguel de Cervantes

In Ireland, a writer is looked upon as a failed conversationalist.

Many a fervid man writes books as cold and flat as graveyard stones.

No tears and the writer, no tears and the reader.

There are three difficulties in authorship: to write anything worth the publishing, to find honest men to publish it, and to get sensible men to read it.

This morning I took out a comma and this afternoon I put it back again.

For a dyed-in-the-wool author nothing is as dead as a book once it is written ... she is rather like a cat whose kittens have grown up. While they were a-growing she was passionately interested in them but now they seem hardly to belong to her - and probably she is involved with another batch of kittens as I am involved with other writing.

That's not writing, that's typing.

Every great and original writer, in proportion as he is great and original, must himself create the taste by which he is to be relished.