Quotes About Authorship

I was taking my first uncertain steps towards writing for children when my own were young. Reading aloud to them taught me a great deal when I had a great deal to learn. It taught me elementary things about rhythm and pace, the necessary musicality of text.

If your enemy has the power to see into the future, make sure you are the author of that future.

You must become the producer, director and actor in the unfolding story of your life.

A screenplay is a story told with pictures, in dialogue and description, and placed within the context of dramatic structure.

Jakie to przygn?biaj?ce, jakie? to obel?ywe, ?e wszystko si? sprowadza do tych kilku pyta? z monologu Hamleta. Min??y wieki, upad?y cywilizacje, odesz?o w nico?? tyle pokole?, a nic si? nie zmieni?o, a tak ma?o si? zmieni?o i nam ta przekl?ta opatrzno?? odbiera z?udn? satysfakcj? pierwsze?stwa, pozbawia autorstwa, czyni nas wiecznymi plagiatorami.

Tasha Alexander

Pat Moynihan could write books with one hand and legislate with the other. I can't; I have a short attention span. The slightest distraction would take me away from writing.

I speak English and Spanish. I write in Spanish; my books are published in English.

While you're writing, you can't concentrate nearly as well on what the speaker is saying.

What comes easiest for me is dialogue. Sometimes when my characters are speaking to me, I have to slow them down so that I'm not simply taking dictation.

Now, I am completely independent - I earn my living by speaking and writing.

The trouble with ghostwriting is that it raises the issue of whether the president is in a state of diminished responsibility for what he says. Does he actually grasp the implications of the words he speaks?

It's a dead give away of an inexperienced writer if every character speaks with the same voice.

I think the most important lesson isn't necessarily to try and write a different book every time, or to try and brand yourself and write one specific kind of book, but to write the kind of books you love to read.

I try to represent specific experiences of specific characters, and that's all I want to try to do. I don't ever try to think about representing a culture, because its impossible, and someone will fault you. And it just doesn't interest me.

I wrote 'The Facebook Era' because I felt like it needed to be written, and I was one of the people who might be qualified to do so. Specifically, my background is that I developed the first business application on Facebook.

You would go mad if you began to speculate about the impact your novel might have while you were still writing it.

Henry James's later works would have been better had he resisted that curious sort of self-indulgence, dictating to a secretary. The roaming garrulousness of ordinary speech is usually corrected when it's transcribed into written prose.

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.

The only things I make money on are speeches and books.

The terms of copyright last far too long: either the life of the author plus 70 years after death for a personal work or 95 years for a corporate work. That length doesn't encourage more authorship - it merely limits the speakers who could share powerful speeches, books, and films.

I record all my speeches and have DTP prints of them. When I happened to read the speeches compiled I thought it made for an interesting read. This set to me thinking on publishing it in book form.

The best bit of novel writing is being allowed to write exactly what you want at the speed that you want, and to include as many different people and places and times as you want, working with pretty much only one person, the editor, whose job it is to get it in good shape for publication.

I can't even get people to spell my name right in my own biography!