Quotes About Authorship

I often write two books simultaneously. Usually one of them starts out as a fun experiment designed to give me a daily break from the real book I'm writing. And then that becomes a real book too.

First and foremost, it's got to be on the page. It starts with the writing.

If you're going to make a statement, I think you should write it in prose and make a statement. If you have characters who are mouthpieces for a point of view, then you have to be very clever about disguising it.

In my own case, the most inflammatory statements I have ever made are ones that I have written and remain willing to defend.

I never know when I finish the novel I am writing which will be the next novel out of the station.

I began tailoring my books to cater to one or another universe of readers. I found it incredibly boring; and frankly, it felt stultifying. I'd previously been in advertising. I felt if I was going to create something to fit a specific market, I might as well have stayed with advertising.

I try to keep a steady pace with my writing. I have found that super-productive days are usually followed by two and even three days when I can hardly write a word. I used to try for 1000 words a day; now I am high-fiving myself after 500.

You cannot steal somebody's intellectual property. Law and justice protect.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

If you're Stephen King and you have a massive body of huge-selling well-respected work, you can pivot and do whatever you want. I don't have that body of work, I don't have that audience that's comfortable with me enough yet to follow my bliss with me.

Unless you are Stephen King, a book signing is attended by maybe 40 or 50 people.

I'm not a dedicated writer in the sense of Stephen King.

Being a best-selling author doesn't make you a millionaire. It's not like Stephen King.

The test of an author is not to be found merely in the number of his phrases that pass current in the corner of newspapers...but in the number of passages that have really taken root in younger minds.

writing a novel is buttering warm toast, while writing a history is herding porcupines with your elbows.

In Catcher in the Rye , the protagonist Holden Caulfield mentions reading books that make him wish he could be friends with the author and be able to call him on the phone and so forth. I would consider a literary work that made someone feel this way a success. Furthermore, it's the only kind of success in literature that means anything to me.

The result was that Preston successfully negotiated quite a few decades without ever coming within hailing distance of puberty. In this state of arrested development, he defiantly lived through many a perverse adventure. And he still lives in the pages of those books I wrote about him, though I stopped writing them some years ago.

A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

Si yo fuera solipsista, probablemente no habría escrito este libro, pues no creería que hubiese alguien más que lo leyera.

Jesus Christ wrote no account of himself, of his birth, parentage, or anything else. Not a line of what is called the New Testament is of his writing.

Question asked of Thomas Perry. What is the most important thing that you have learned in your writing experience, so far? "If any writer is going to be remembered after he's gone, it will be for the parts of his work that are absolutely original, and would never have existed if he hadn't written them. So if you're writing a scene that you've read, watched, or heard before, then you're wasting your time and your reader's.

The conclusion of the letter is marked by Paul taking the reed pen from the amanuensis and writing the conclusion in his own hand.

the Gospels were not written by the persons whose names they bear, that they were written many years after the time these men are said to have lived, and that they are full of interpolations and errors. The first that we know of the four gospels is at the time of Irenæus, who, in the second century, intimates that he had received four gospels, as authentic scriptures. This pious forger was probably the author of the fourth, as we shall presently see.

The future author is one who discovers that language, the exploration and manipulation of the resources of language, will serve him in winning through to his way.