Quotes About Authorship

Readers often feel they know an author because they've read their books. To a degree, this is often true. We write from our individual worldviews, using the beliefs and understanding we have of the world and others.

all the things I'd done in my life, of all the versions of myself I'd lived out, there was one that had never changed: I was a writer.

Of course, critics asked what a novelist was doing on the serious editorial page. After all, I was no intellectual with grey hair. I couldn't answer them. They were probably right at some level. However, this was destiny. This was meant to happen.

I wasn't satisfied with "Stuart Little" on TV, but I didn't expect to be... It is the fixed purpose of television and motion pictures to scrap the author, sink him without a trace, on the theory that he is incompetent, has never read his own stuff, is not responsible for anything he ever wrote, and wouldn't know what to do about it even if he were.

Most writers have a cherished beat-up typewriter and a favorite well-maintained pen.

Is a stolen copyright a copywrong?

I write because... every writer has only one story to tell, really, and I haven't told mine yet.

...a writer is, by trade, a talkative fellow on paper and appreciates an audience.

I am a very particular person about having all I write printed as I write it. I require to see a proof, a revise, a re-revise, and a double re-revise, or fourth-proof rectified impression of all my productions, especially verse. A misprint kills a sensitive author. An intentional change of his text murders him. No wonder so many poets die young!

Being an author is having angels whisper in your ear — and devils, too.

Authorship is exhibitionism, and readers a species of voyeur.

Being an author is being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.

EDITOR... a bit of sandpaper applied to all forms of originality by the publisher-proprietor...

"And when once the itch of literature comes over a man, nothing can cure it but the scratching of a pen." "But if you have not a pen, I suppose you must scratch any other way you can." "To be sure... I have seen a litherary gentleman in a sponging house do crack things on the wall, with a bit of burnt stick..."

Hij kwam binnen in de lappenjas van een afkorting N.S.M.A.N.N. (Nederlandse Schrijver van Marokkaanse Afkomst met Nederlandse Nationaliteit), maar ging weer weg, na een goede rui, een verlies van overbodige veren, als auteur. Hij is stukken magerder geworden, maar gelukkiger. Noem hem voortaan simpelweg auteur.

I know exactly what I want to write. I do not write until I do. Usually I write it all down only once. And that goes relatively quickly, since it really depends only on how fast I type.

He lik'd those literary cooks Who skim the cream of others' books; And ruin half an author's graces, By plucking bon-mots from their places...

It is not merely enough to love literature if one wishes to spend one's life as a writer. It is a dangerous undertaking on the most primitive level. For, it seems to me, the act of writing with serious intent involves enormous personal risk. It entails the ongoing courage for self-discovery. It means one will walk forever on the tightrope, with each new step presenting the possiblity of learning a truth about oneself that is too terrible to bear.

The only way for errors to occur in a program is by being put there by the author. No other mechanisms are known. Programs can't acquire bugs by sitting around with other buggy programs.

The Anxiety of Influence

There would be nights when I would wake up and couldn't get back to sleep. So I would go downstairs and write. The staff had a pool going on how many pages of typing I would bring in here in the morning.

The Bible is the Word of God written in the words of men.

I asked Ring Lardner the other day how he writes his short stories, and he said he wrote a few widely separated words or phrases on a piece of paper and then went back and filled in the spaces.

But it is a historical fact that the Jews, and no one else, gave the world the Bible. It is a historical fact that the Jews introduced to the pagan world the idea of a God who demanded righteousness......Even most of the books of the New Testament were written by Jews.