Quotes About Authorship

I did not write it. God wrote it. I merely did His dictation.

I did not write it. (Uncle Tom's Cabin) God wrote it. I merely did his dictation.

Two bits of advice. One, always write what you love. Two, always write what the market wants. It's not that those two things are in opposition really. It's just that you have to find an intersection between the two. Writing an unmarketable book just strikes me as silly. Writing a book you don't love – now that would be evil.

Ik ben van plan een verhaal te schrijven, waarin een vent bezig is een verhaal te schrijven. En in het verhaal, dat die tweede vent schrijft is ook een vent bezig een verhaal te schrijven. En in het verhaal weer, dat die vent schrijft, is weer een vent bezig een verhaal te schrijven, en zo tot in het oneindige. En weet je nu wie die vent is, die het verhaal schrijft in het verhaal van de oneindigste vent? ... Ik.

Write a page a day and you'll have a complete novel in year.

I don't know how many good books I still have in me I hope there are another four or five.

I didn't want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that's a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I'm proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

I got a lovely check today from being a writer that I earned by sitting at home. That's rewarding.

It is the little writer rather than the great writer who seems never to quote, and the reason is that he is never really doing anything else.

Heather Vogel Frederick

To write three series a year you only need to commit to writing 10 pages per day, or editing 50 pages of text per day. Plus, writing is my job, and I need to write to eat, so I'm highly motivated to get up and get to work!

Here's a news flash--writers are selfish people. Truth is, creative types like me are driven by one impulse--to make up a world in which we get to control everything and everyone. We decide who enters and who exits, what the weather will be, who will hook up with whom, who will win and who will lose. It makes us feel powerful and, in all honesty, has relatively little to do with thinking about what will make anyone else happy.

If you want to write fiction, the best thing you can do is take two aspirins, lie down in a dark room, and wait for the feeling to pass.

The short story, I should point out, is perforce a labor of love in today's literary world; there's precious little economic incentive to write one...

The novel, I submit, is not merely the ultimate goal. It is also the place to start.

But I have long loved the written word, and come to see in it the power of the sleeping lion. This is my name. This is who I am. This is how I got here. In the absence of an audience, I will write down my story so that it waits like a restful beast with lungs breathing and heart beating.

Of all the creative work produced by humans anywhere, a tiny fraction has continuing commercial value. For that tiny fraction, the copyright is a crucially important legal device.

The author concealed behind the pseudonym of Geber is probably an Italian Franciscan friar and lecturer named Paul of Taranto.

When it's going well [writing] goes terribly fast. It isn't at all surprising to write a chapter in a day, which for me is about twenty-two pages. When it's going badly, it isn't really going badly; it's just the beginning.

Without a pen in my hand I can't think.

If success in selling is my primary interest, I am not primarily a writer, but a salesperson. If I teach success in selling as the writer's primary objective, I am not teaching writing; I'm teaching, or pretending to teach, the production and marketing of a commodity.

You know, I don't think a lot about why one book connects with its readers and another doesn't. Probably because I don't want to start thinking, "Am I popular?" I spent way too much time thinking about that in high school.

Well, the secret to writing is writing. It's only a secret to people who don't want to hear it. Writing is how you be a writer.

To make this world a whole lot brighter, when I grow up I'll be a writer.