Quotes About Authorship

Get black on white.

When an author is yet living, we estimate his powers by his worst performance; and when he is dead, we rate them by his best.

We like that a sentence should read as if its author, had he held a plough instead of a pen, could have drawn a furrow deep and straight to the end.

A good writer is basically a story-teller, not a scholar or a redeemer of mankind.

I believe the writer... should always be the final judge. I have always held to that position and have sometimes seen books hurt thereby, but at least as often helped. The book belongs to the author.

As for my next book, I am going to hold myself from writing it till I have it impending in me: grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear, pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the parts that are good are not original, and the parts that are original are not good.

Talent alone cannot make a writer. There must be a man behind the book.

Bad writers are those who try to express their own feeble ideas in the language of good ones.

A man may write himself out of reputation when nobody else can do it.

Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.

I don't know anything but the simplest rules of English grammar, and I seldom consciously apply them. Nevertheless, I instinctively write correctly and, I like to think, in an interesting fashion. I know when something sounds right and when it doesn't, and I can tell the difference without hesitation, even when writing at breakneck speed. How do I do this? I haven't the faintest idea.

Your book is bloated and self-indulgent

Writers like to believe they're in control of their material, but that's just a comforting lie. After more than twenty-five years of making my life as storyteller, it's become extremely -sometimes painfully- clear to me that I'm just a vehicle, a way for the story to get out into the world. But it's the story itself that does the telling.

Yeah, I'm not a virgin and I hate writing.

They say that every author in the course of a career has a couple of books that are just grueling, and Vishous's was definitely that way for me.

I've never really liked directing. I became a director because I didn't like directors telling me how to edit, and I became a writer because I had to write something in order to be able to direct something. So I did everything out of necessity, but what I really like is editing.

Although many of his other novels are brilliant there is a power in 'Oliver Twist' that I believe Dickens never managed to retrieve. It is as if he was sent to this earth with the sole purpose of writing this book.

Before I start, I trick myself into thinking I know what's going to happen in the story, but the characters have ideas of their own, and I always go with the character's choices. Most of the time I discover plot twists and directions that are better than what I originally had planned.

Twitter is fun because it lets me stay in touch with all my original readers who grew up with my books. I love hearing from readers instantly on Twitter.

When I was first writing 'Feed' - which was the first book I published as Mira - I talked about it very openly on my blog, on Twitter, that I was writing this book, and it wasn't until after it was sold that I said 'Mira Grant' wrote this book. And the reason there was really purely marketing-based.

I have a Twitter account; I have a fantastic Facebook page.

The most important thing is readers. I've got a huge Twitter following, but I don't really think it sells books; I don't think a huge Facebook following sells books - although these things aren't bad, of course.

You write for two people, yourself and your audience, who are usually better educated and at least as smart.