Quotes About Authorship

The author, John Steinbeck, had been a pussy, too afraid to make anything happen. He'd abandoned his characters to suffer. As had God.

Repeat the mantra: Writing is when I make the words. Editing is when I make them not shitty.

Writing is the act of creation. Put words on a page, words to sentences, sentences to paragraphs, paragraphs to seven-book epic fantasy cycles with books so heavy you could choke a hippo. But don't give writing too much power, either. A wizard controls his magic; it doesn't control him.

Her self, then, was represented in her books.

Being a writer means crying over the sad parts, even though you already know it's going to be okay.

Put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it. ( Casual Chance , 1964)

I had intended to write this book anonymously, using my prison number only. But when the manuscript was completed, I saw that as an anonymous publication it would lose half its value

Precisely this one, which I had intended to be published anonymously so that it could never build any reputation on the part of the author, did become a success.... Don't aim at success - the more you aim and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued, it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one's dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one's surrender to a person other than oneself.

A woman's writing is always feminine; it cannot help being feminine; at its best it is most feminine; the only difficulty lies in defining what we mean by feminine.

As for my next book, I won't write it till it has grown heavy in my mind like a ripe pear; pendant, gravid, asking to be cut or it will fall.

For now that Aphra Behn had done it, girls could go to their parents and say, You need not give me an allowance; I can make money by my pen.

I like reading my own writing. It seems to fit me closer than it did before.

It has the permanent quality of literature.

When you asked me to speak about women and fiction I sat down on the banks of a river and began to wonder what the words meant. They might mean simply a few remarks about Fanny Burney; a few more about Jane Austen; a tribute to the Brontes and a sketch of Haworth Parsonage under snow, some witticisms if possible about Miss Mitford; a respectful allusion to George Eliot; a reference to Mrs Gaskell and one would have done.

The writer has us by the hand, forces us along her road, makes us see what she sees, never leaves us for a moment or allows us to forget her. At the end we are steeped through and through with the genius, the vehemence, the indignation of Charlotte Bronte. Remarkable faces, figures of strong outline and gnarled feature have flashed upon us in passing; but it is through her eyes that we have seen them.

Cats do not go to heaven. Women cannot write the plays of Shakespeare.

and Orlando (1928), and the book-length essay A Room of One's Own (1929) with its famous dictum, a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction

I will write, she had said, what I enjoy writing.

It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or a woman pure and simple.

I have written this book quicker than any other," she notes in her diary, "[and] it is all a joke; & yet gay & quick reading I think; a writers holiday. I feel more and more sure that I will never write a novel again

She will write in a rage where she should write calmly. She will write foolishly where she should write wisely. She will write of herself where she should write of her characters. She is at war with her lot. How could she help but die young, cramped and thwarted?

Una donna deve avere soldi e una stanza suoi propri se vuole scrivere romanzi.

In the same way once a book is printed and published it ceases to be the property of the author; he commits it to the care of other people;

They wrote as women write, not as men write. Of all the thousand women who wrote novels then, they alone entirely ignored the perpetual admonitions of the eternal pedagogue – write this, think that.