Quotes About Authorship

I never dreamt I could be an author when I grew up. It just didn't occur to me, because I thought you had to be a) academic, so go to university, things like that, and I didn't think I was clever, or b) dead because I just assumed all the authors in the library were dead.

I majored in journalism at Arizona State University, where I began writing the columns I write now, but I cannot, in good conscience, refer to myself as a writer. I'm a columnist, maybe a journalist, I guess I'm an author, but writer... no. That's not up to me to call myself, that's rather lofty. It's for the reader to decide.

I can be unkind to someone in the street or in the subway - I'm a bad-tempered person - but I'm unable to be unkind to a character. They exist because of me, and I have responsibility for them.

As authors, we know that it is very difficult to unleash one's creativity.

My rage and sense of alienation as to how women have been written, have allowed themselves to be written, in so many ways, has political roots.

I learned the enormous power of writing for yourself, especially now that people seem to be receptive to the fact that women can write.

Truly I never thought of myself as writing legal thrillers, and I still don't think I do. I write stories about women.

The nonfiction novel or literary memoir as authored by women is usually given a much harder time in mainstream criticism.

The memoir by women, read by female readers, is considered a market form, not "great literature."

I have almost never been compared to male writers in any review. All women.

I like narrative, and I ultimately am in love with the men and women I write about, most of them.

If you're a woman writer, sometime, somewhere, you will be asked: Do you think of yourself as a writer first, or as a woman first? Look out. Whoever asks this hates and fears both writing and women.

Not all women write the same. But I don't understand why the model is that you're supposed to write like a man, and that means you're a real writer.

Believe it or not, I don't collaborate with women, though my agent and editor are both females. For the most part, they do little editing on my characters.

As the faculty of writing has chiefly been a masculine endowment the reproach of making the world miserable has always been thrown upon the women.

It is usually unbearably painful to read a book by an author who knows way less than you do, unless the book is a novel.

Only mothers will ever know the true struggle and sacrifice it takes to create life. Authors come in at a close second.

I wrote the first draft of my first novel at Michigan, and then I wrote the first draft of 'Salvage the Bones' at Stanford. So I workshopped the entire thing.

It's often the case with directors that they don't like to share credit, which is the case of Stanley. He would prefer just A Film By Stanley Kubrick including music and everything.

I sit in my little office and I feel like I've got all my readers staring at me.

I don't tend to do category fiction very well. One of my problems when I was starting off was that publishers were hesitant to handle my books because they were never sure what I was going to do next.

I don't think I've ever made a claim to startling originality.

There's a really nice moment in the life of a piece of writing where the writer starts to get a feeling of it outgrowing him - or he starts to see it having a life of its own that doesn't have anything to do with his ego or his desire to 'be a good writer.'

With a novel, no matter where I am in it, I'm fretting about it. Every time I write a book, it starts with great forward momentum. Then there seems to be a period where it slows down a bit, and other things intervene. Then I gain momentum.