Quotes About Authorship

I never engage negatively with reviewers. If someone says something that enrages me, I do what I do on stage. I make a joke about myself and move on. Sometimes people say things that are manifestly wrong or even apparently malicious. That's fine, too. It's a response.

If you feel like you don't have a choice to write it, write it. If you feel like you do have a choice, then move on, because there are so many books in the world.

After Shakespeare, Dickens is the great creator of characters, multiple characters.

It's always hard for a writer to make herself into a character; I had to figure out what my defining characteristics were, and that's something I had to work through multiple drafts to figure out.

I show up in my writing room at approximately 10 A.M. every morning without fail. Sometimes my muse sees fit to join me there and sometimes she doesn't, but she always knows where I'll be. She doesn't need to go hunting in the taverns or on the beach or drag the boulevard looking for me.

My generation was maybe the last in which you could set up shop as a writer and hope to make a living at it.

I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature.

My number one goal has always been to try to tell interesting, cohesive, long-term stories.

I am my own secretary; I dictate, I compose, I copy all myself.

'Drawn & Quarterly' has always given me complete editorial control over my books and comics, so any decision about what to include or exclude from the book was my own.

I put my soul into every book I write.

Mysteries I read for fun, so I will probably never write one, for fear of spoiling the fun.

I started writing in my 20s. I just wanted to write, but I didn't have anything to write about, so in the beginning, I wrote entertainments - mainly murder mysteries.

I was always determined that one way or another I would force a book on the world, even if I had to resort to writing one about a tabby cat who solves mysteries.

I've been typed as historical fiction, historical women's fiction, historical mystery, historical chick lit, historical romance - all for the same book.

It usually takes me about three years to research and write one of my historical sagas; this is one reason why I take medieval mystery breaks, for they can be completed in only a year.

It's not as though I decided to sit down and write a mystery novel so I could capitalize on my parents' success.

Writers have it easy. If you write a bestseller or have your book made into a movie, you'll never have to work again, or so the myth goes.

I don't have to mumble something under my breath when someone asks me what I do anymore. I can just say, definitively, 'I'm an author.' And the best part? That's not a myth. That's just the truth.

Writers divide into those who write biting their nails and those who don't. Some writers write licking their finger.

When you see two writers named on a movie, one of them did some drafts and got the boot.

I'm good at - or, rather, I like - giving names to characters.

You do get fond of your characters. Handing them on is like giving a child to a nanny.

Most of my books begin with a nap on my couch here, when I dream up characters and story lines, and then I write on my laptop in the recliner and handle the business side of email at my desk, which is sagging in the middle - maybe from so many words?