Quotes About Authorship

Write a book, not the book.

Are you giving the same advice over and over and over again to clients, patients, pupils, interns or friends? If the answer is yes, you should probably write a book about whatever it is that you keep repeating.

An author who rewrites his own work must essentially be two people. One is the free flowing uncritical writer who creates the bulk of the material—the other is the extremely critical editor whose aim it is to make the book as good as it can become.

La première qualité d'un écrivain était de savoir captiver son lecteur par une bonne histoire. Un récit capable de l'arracher à son existence pour le projeter au coeur de l'intimité et de la vérité des personnages.Le style n'était que le moyen d'innerver la narration et de la rendre vibrante.

The author in his work should be like God in the universe: everywhere present and nowhere visible.

The writer in his work must be like God in his creation—invisible and all-powerful: he must be everywhere felt, but never seen.

A writer's brush is a warrior's bow, the letters it shapes are arrows that must hit the mark on the page. The calligrapher is an archer, or a general on a battlefield. Someone wrote that long ago. She feels that way this morning. She is at war.

Writing a book isn't an easy process nor is it always enjoyable, but it is one of life's most satisfying achievements.

Go APE: Author a great book, Publish it quickly, and Entrepreneur your way to success. Self-publishing isn't easy, but it's fun and sometimes even lucrative. Plus, your book could change the world.

This book is my obliging you. This is a book I never would have dared write, if I did not feel protected and obligated by your madness.

And why don't you write?Write! Writing is for you, you are for you; your body is yours, take it. I know why you haven't written (And why I didn't write before the age of twenty-seven). Because writing is at once too high, too great for you, it's reserved for the great - that is, for "great men"; and it's "silly". Besides, you've written a little, but in secret.

The only book that is worth writing is the one we don't have the courage or strength to write.

The author is not only the one who signs but also a completely unknown person blended with (legendary,] mythical, complex, variable consanguinity.

Écris, que nul ne ce retienne, que rien ne t'arrête : ni homme, ni imbécile machine capitaliste où les maisons d'édition sont les rusés et obséquieux relais des impératifs d'une économie qui fonctionne contre nous et sur notre dos ; ni toi-même.

Goodbye, Mr. Chips!' was first submitted by James Hilton to the British Weekly in 1933, but it came to prominence when it was printed as the leading article of The Atlantic in April 1934.

With regard to the work itself, I dare not venture a judgment, for I do not understand it.

I am quite content to go down to posterity as a scissors and paste man for that seems to me a harsh but not unjust description

No, it did a lot of other things, too. [turning down fan who asked to kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses

There is no more grand moment in a writer's life than typing the first sentence of a new book.

if he can write a book at all, a writer cannot do it by peeping over his shoulder at somebody else, any more than a woman can have a baby by watching some other woman have one. It is a genital process, and all of its stages are intra-abdominal;

Write about us," Robinson urged. "Tell our story." And I did it; I told our story. You hold it in your hands.

James Patterson

James Patterson