Quotes About Authorship

Everyone has a book inside of them - but it doesn't do any good until you pry it out.

I get up in the morning, torture a typewriter until it screams, then stop.

Whatever was said about Ralph Ellison, 'Invisible Man' was considered untouchable.

I think it is quite untrue that it is standard journalistic practice to name the interviewer when quoting from an interview.

In 'Me Before You,' the two characters popped into my head fully formed, which is really strange and unusual. Other books, I sit on them for two or three months. I have a whole routine: I buy a nice book; I hand-write all their characteristics. I put them through little tests just to see how they would react to things.

My job is to look out on that world that I write about and be as honest as I possibly can about that world. If that's optimistic and uplifting, OK. If it's not, OK.

I had been blogging for a few years when Jonah Straus, my now-literary agent, reached out to see if I'd consider writing a cookbook. At the time, I didn't feel ready; I was still getting adjusted to life in the upper Midwest, and I was still finding my recipe voice.

I started writing 'Normal People' not knowing that anyone would read it, not knowing that anyone would read the first book, so I didn't really have any hang ups about, 'Oh, I can't do this again. I've done this already.' It was just a project I was working on for my own amusement.

It seems like every few years a big name author will holler something about how evil, heinous, and morally wrong fan fiction and fan fiction writers are, and then the Internet gets all upset and shocked, and then the author is shocked that people could get so upset.

There are always people screeching and upset that I did this or didn't do that. Basically, they're upset that I didn't rewrite an earlier book they particularly liked.

If a writer I represent gets a bad or unfair review, I suffer. I'm upset and outraged and do everything I can to try and change that. But I would never do that on behalf of my own book because I wouldn't expect my writers to do that.

I really do love 'Panama.' But I'd also have to admit that right now, if I were driven to write another novel like that, I wouldn't even try to find a publisher for it. It simply wouldn't be published. I'd be writing it to put in my closet upstairs.

When I say work I only mean writing. Everything else is just odd jobs.

Anyone who has a choice and doesn't choose to write is a fool. The work is hard, the perks are few, the pay is terrible, and the product, when it's finally finished, is pure joy.

My work stops at publication. If the books don't contain in themselves their reasons for being - questions and answers - it means I was wrong to have them published.

The writer has to force himself to work. He has to make his own hours and if he doesn't go to his desk at all there is nobody to scold him.

The work of Henry James has always seemed divisible by a simple dynastic arrangement into three reigns: James I, James II, and the Old Pretender

Suffering is too strong a word, but writing is serious work. I pull the stuff up from me - it's not as if it's a pleasure.

I don't necessarily start with the beginning of the book. I just start with the part of the story that's most vivid in my imagination and work forward and backward from there.

If you're fortunate enough with your history, like with Men in the Cities, your work becomes so absorbed in culture that the authorship of it doesn't exist anymore.

The writing for me is hard work and I always look forward to drawing the pictures.

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.

I'm not too fond of the hard work and the constant battle with self-doubt that goes on when I write, but I figure that's part of the territory.

From the time I read my first Hemingway work, The Sun Also Rises, as a student at Soldan High School in St. Louis, I was struck with an affliction common to my generation: Hemingway Awe.