Quotes About Authorship

Qué nadie se ría de la única anécdota que he narrado aquí. En buena hora podrán ustedes reírse de cuanta cosa haya escrito yo en estas páginas. Pero no cuando se trata de Robinson Crusoe. ¡Por dios! Porque es este un asunto serio para mí..., y les ruego que lo tomen ustedes de la misma manera, por lo tanto.

The only circumstances in which I would write a roman a clef would be if I'd lost my fucking car keys.

This is vexing: I feel in a kind of limbo - an author but not truly an author, true authorship being conferred by having a book physically published - a thing you can hold in your hand, purchase in a bookshop.

A writer needs three things, experience, observation, and imagination, any two of which, at times any one of which, can supply the lack of the others.

It begins with a character, usually, and once he stands up on his feet and begins to move, all I can do is trot along behind him with a paper and pencil trying to keep up long enough to put down what he says and does.

I only write when I am inspired. Fortunately I am inspired at 9 o'clock every morning.

In writing, you must kill your darlings.

I only write when the spirit moves me ... and the spirit moves me every day. William Faulkner, Oxford, Mississippi

Then that had passed. It was 1923 and I wrote a book and discovered that my doom, fate, was to keep on writing books: not for any exterior or ulterior purpose: just writing the books for the sake of writing the books;

Every writer must learn to kill his little darlings.

Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be a boys' game.

he appeared not at all auctorial in the insufferable sense of the word (I think of writers who pose with their dogs, or hold questionable medical devices, or mousse their hair until its specific gravity resembles that of pound cake).

You are trying to kidnap what I have rightfully stolen, and I think it quite ungentlemanly.

You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone else had a chance to read it.

Jelenka Harvey Harcourt Trade Publishers 15 East 26th Street New York, NY 10010

Buy the 25th anniversary version, I would have told you. It's got a long intro by yours truly where I explain a lot about the Morgenstern estate and the horrible legal problems I've had with them. That version is still out there and what you are interested in is the same thing that I am interested in—namely, at last, getting Buttercup's Baby published. I

You had to admire a guy who called his own new book a classic before it was published and anyone else had a chance to read it. Maybe he figured if he didn't do it, nobody would, or maybe he was just trying to give the reviewers a helping hand; I don't know.

The only impeccable writers are those who never wrote.

A good author insists on being accepted on his own terms, and audiences must bicker awhile before they're willing to give in. One learns not to be resentful about this condition but to credit it to human nature.

The best way to write a novel is to do it behind your own back.

What if most fiction is, at best, moderately important? What if it is so vague and culturally drivel-some, and so mediated by everything else once the culture industry extrudes it through a writer-shaped nozzle, that our stern declarations about subversive literature are, mostly, kind of adorable?

But I do think it's important to remember that writers do not have a monopoly of wisdom on their books. They can be wrong about their own books, they can often learn about their own books.

Writers don't give prescriptions. They give headaches!

Most writers who are beginners, if they are honest with themselves, will admit that they are praying for a readership as they begin to write. But it should be the quality of the craft, not the audience, that should be the greatest motivating factor.