Quotes About Authorship

They were here already, all of them: Dustfinger and Capricorn, Basra and Roxane, Minerva, Violante, the Adderhead...you merely wrote their story, but they didn't like it, and now they're writing it for themselves.

For me -- for pretty much every writer -- the big problem isn't piracy, it's obscurity.

You don't need anyone else's approval or permission to enjoy the magic of writing.

A great writer creates a world of his own and his readers are proud to live in it. A lesser writer may entice them in for a moment, but soon he will watch them filing out.

The ideas I stand for are not mine. I borrowed them from Socrates. I swiped them from Chesterfield. I stole them from Jesus. And I put them in a book. If you don't like their rules, whose would you use?

I started writing because of a terrible feeling of powerlessness, the novelist Anita Brookner has said. The National Book Award winner Alice McDermott noted that the most difficult thing about becoming a writer was convincing herself that she had anything to say that people would want to read. There's nothing to writing, the columnist Red Smith once commented. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and open a vein.

The new rule shall rule as the soul rules, and as the love and justice and equality that are in the soul rule.

Although this poetry collection was first published in 1855, when Whitman was 36 years old, the poet spent his whole life revising the poems in several editions.

asked Jobs why he wanted me to be the one to write his biography. "I think you're good at getting people to talk," he replied.

In a paper he wrote in the spring of 1907, he began by exuding a joyful self-assurance about having neither the library nor the inclination to know what other theorists had written on the topic. "Other authors might have already clarified part of what I am going to say," he wrote. "I felt I could dispense with doing a literature search (which would have been very troublesome for me), especially since there is good reason to hope that others will fill this gap.

bobbybaird i'm a writer, so are you. we try to compose our thoughts and words for effect as well as sense. vain of us? a bit.

the author's judgment is always present, always evident to anyone who knows how to look for it. Whether its particular forms are harmful or serviceable is always a complex question, a question that cannot be settled by any easy reference to abstract rules. As we begin now to deal with this question, we must never forget that though the author can to some extent choose his disguises, he can never choose to disappear.

Our main quarrel is with the author who makes his personal appearance a substitute for the artistic presentation of his subject, thinking that talking about the subject is equivalent to presenting it."6

You must become the producer, director and actor in the unfolding story of your life.

As I understand it, I am being paid only for my work in arranging the words; my property is that arrangement. The thoughts in this book, on the contrary, are not mine. They came freely to me, and I give them freely away. I have no intellectual property, and I think that all claimants to such property are theives.

my war on commas. They are a pestilence. They must be stopped.

But it was not until Samuel Richardson's Pamela in 1740 and, a decade later, Henry Fielding's Tom Jones, that the novel reached the form as we know it today, and opened an outpouring of work in 19C that would transform literature throughout the West.

More important: Unless you're in the hard sciences, the process of writing is your most valuable single tool for developing better ideas. The process of writing is the dominant source of intellectual creativity.

the process of writing is your most valuable single tool for developing better ideas. The process of writing is the dominant source of intellectual creativity.

To be a serious writer requires discipline that is iron fisted. It's sitting down and doing it whether you think you have it in you or not. Everyday. Alone. Without interruption. Contrary to what most people think, there is no glamour to writing. In fact, it's heartbreak most of the time. --Harper Lee

I invented a new word today: plagiarism.

I am transcribing a book that I have, in a sense, not yet written, and in another sense, have always written, and in another sense, am currently writing, and in another sense, am always writing, and in another sense, will never write.

Writing is a bit like being a god

What Diantha Did was first published in serialised form in Gilman's magazine The Forerunner between late 1909 and October 1910.