Quotes About Authorship

The unprofitable game of profiling what could or couldn't be true of Shakespeare's character, based on what his characters said or did, had begun.

With Malone's decision to parse the plays for evidence of what an author thought or felt, literary biography had crossed a Rubicon.

Shakespeare had no Boswell–but neither did Marlowe, Jonson, Webster or any other contemporary dramatist.

In his own day, and for over a century and a half after his death, nobody treated Shakespeare's works as autobiographical.

what started with the Sonnets migrated to the plays, though the claim that Shakespeare was speaking for himself through his dramatic characters was more difficult to sustain.

When I was a young writer, I liked to imagine that I was paying someone for every word I wrote, rather than being paid for it; it was a fine way to discipline myself to use only those words I needed.

I think I may boast myself to be, with all possible vanity, the most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress.

My style of writing is very different from yours.

I can always live by my pen.

THIS little work was finished in the year 1803, and intended for immediate publication.

Cuando un párrafo está bien escrito es un placer leerlo, sea de quien sea y proceda de donde proceda, quizá con mayor placer siendo su verdadero autor Mr. Hume o el doctor Robertson y no Caractus, Agrícola o Alfredo el Grande.

Lady Robert is delighted with P. and P., and really was so, as I understand, before she knew who wrote it, for of course she knows now. He told her with as much satisfaction as if it were my wish.

She did not think it any coincidence that ideas denigrating literary authorship had taken center stage simultaneously with the emergence of formerly silent voices for whom the act of writing, and publishing, had the deepest and most delicious possible meaning, simultaneously with the emergence of an audience for whom the act of thinking and writing was an act of skeptical anger, sometimes a transitional act to violence.

Yo admiraba esa férrea disciplina que le permitía centrarse en escribir una novela sobre Alaska por la mañana y un libro sobre la Casa Blanca por la tarde, así que, en cierto modo, también admiré el hecho de que mantuviese su palabra y no volviese a hablarme nunca más.

there must be an inviolate place where the choices and decisions, however imperfect, are the writer's own, where the decision must be as individual and solitary as birth or death.

Blogs are easy to start, but unless the author is famous, it takes years to build a following.

Unlike many travel books I didn't set out to travel with the idea of writing a book in mind.

Well, unlike a lot of authors, I will be the one to cop to having a ghostwriter. I've always written with someone else.

Unlike fiction, which you create before you go into production, with reality you kind of create it after everything is produced. The drama and the storytelling is really done in post.

Sometimes, we writers find the perfect research material. I can't overstate how how precious that feels - it's as though you're having an intimate conversation with someone who has the key to unlock your project.

What's the point in being an unpopular writer? It just doesn't make a lot of sense. For me it doesn't, anyway.

All the uncontrollable and unpredictable parts of my life - from the actual creation to my emotional responses to the finished book - I've succeeded in banishing to the office. And I think I'm happier for it.

I think a lot of writers are unrealistic about having their books translated into film.

Unhappy and unsettled childhood helps in writing.