Quotes About Authorship

One of the things I learned from my father, and it did not serve me well at all, was that he was a successful writer, he earned a living. And it was a shock for me to find out that it was actually hard to make a living as a writer.

One of the things I learnt over the years is that there is a craft to writing, like there is a craft to acting. I hadn't done my apprenticeship as a writer. I did try to be a writer for hire but I'm not any good at it.

One of the things that happens when you write characters - and maybe this is my own sentimentality - is that I always find I have an instinct to protect them.

One thing I've learned now is that I should not say when a book is coming out until I'm sure I know.

The story and the characters of 'Girl Online' are mine.

The people who are writing online and the people in my genre of creative non-fiction exert a great deal more freedom that journalists are allowed to exert in their day-to-day work.

The only difference between a good writer who publishes a book and a good writer who doesn't is that the writer who publishes actually finished her book.

I think there is only one way to write fiction - alone, in a room, without interruption or any distraction.

The only time I was ever approached to write a book was when I was most famous.

I think with one exception I've never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.

Any fool can make history, but it takes a genius to write it.

In old days books were written by men of letters and read by the public.  Nowadays books are written by the public and read by nobody.

I'm too fond of reading books to care to write them.

I don't know whose brilliant idea that was, but it wasn't mine, that's for sure.

I never want to see anyone, and I never want to go anywhere or do anything. I just want to write.

All a publisher has to do is write cheques at intervals, while a lot of deserving and industrious chappies rally round and do the real work.

I just sit at my typewriter and curse a bit.

From my earliest years I had always wanted to be a writer. It was not that I had any particular message for humanity. I am still plugging away and not the ghost of one so far, so it begins to look as though, unless I suddenly hit mid-season form in my eighties, humanity will remain a message short.

The awful part of the writing game is that you can never be sure the stuff is any good.

with each new book of mine I have always the feeling that this time I have picked a lemon in the garden of literature.

I have never written a novel yet...without doing 40,000 words or more and finding they were all wrong and going back and starting again, and this after filling 400 words with notes, mostly delirious, before getting into anything in the nature of a coherent scenario.

There is nothing an author today has to guard himself more carefully against than the Saga Habit. The least slackening of vigilance and the thing has gripped him.

Tricky devils, these novelists. The ink gets into their heads.

Am I allowed to ask my book whether it's true I wrote it?