Quotes About Authorship

When I was a staff writer on 'NYPD Blue,' it was truly my job to hear David Milch's voice for that show and to deliver episodes that embodied that voice.

I jump around in the plotting stage, where I basically just make a bulleted list of every damn thing that happens in the entire book.

Because I am kind of distracted, I don't tend to sit at my desk 9 to 5. It can be two hours a day, or, when I'm in the final editing stages, it can be 14 hours a day.

You know, I can't imagine 9 to 5 writing. That takes some stamina.

Without sounding pompous, I really do feel that I have a set of standards that I must adhere to, even leaving aside considerations of what the readers expect.

Standing out as a writer today requires more than a bright idea and limpid prose. Authors need to become businesspeople as well.

I write books I'd enjoy reading, I'm the reader standing behind my shoulder.

Behind every writer stands a very large bookshelf.

Writers who want to interfere with adaptations of their work are basically undemocratic. The book still stands as an entity on its own.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work.

I have yet to see a piece of writing, political or non-political, that does not have a slant. All writing slants the way a writer leans, and no man is born perpendicular.

I shall never be a heretic; I may err in dispute, but I do not wish to decide anything finally; on the other hand, I am not bound by the opinions of men.

Whatever your Bible translation is, it stands on the shoulders of one man - William Tyndale.

When a man is in doubt about this or that in his writing, it will often guide him if he asks himself how it will tell a hundred years hence.

Sensibility alters from generation to generation in everybody, whether we will or no; but expression is only altered by a man of genius.

God is its author, and not man; he laid The key-note of all harmonies; he planned All perfect combinations, and he made Us so that we could hear and understand.

If a man could give birth it would be to a book - it's an 18-month gestation period.

It is splendid to be a great writer, to put men into the frying pan of your words and make them pop like chestnuts.

The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.

There are men that will make you books, and turn them loose into the world, with as much dispatch as they would do a dish of fritters.

To create a market for your writing you have to be consistent, professional, a continuing writer - not just a one-article or a one-story or a one-book man.

No man was more foolish when he had not a pen in his hand, or more wise when he had

You don't think it was because a white man wrote it, a black man wrote it, a green man wrote it. What-doesn't make a difference!