Quotes About Authorship

I remain convinced that the most valuable use of time for a newly published author is to write a second book that's even better than the first, and a third that's better than the second, and on and on.

Honest criticism, I suppose, has its place. But honest writing is infinitely more valuable.

Selling an idea to a publisher is not as valuable as selling your audience to a publisher.

I both admired my father and his writing, and I saw how much he valued it.

We calculate that our urgings of the coauthors of those com- pleted volumes cost us on the average, per volume, two friendships for life and several more friendships for at least a decade.

If you expect me to believe that a lawyer wrote A Midsummer Night's Dream , I must be dafter than I look.

The real world is a book in bad need of an editor

There were no characters or events written in, which was a shame—considering the work he did on the world itself, this might have been a bestseller.

Que la mitad de una novela la pone el que la escribe, y la otra mitad el que la lee.

Since nothing annoys a writer who doesn't write as much as being asked what he's writing

Any gloss on authors, their character traits or biographies, hides the fact that only bad writing has an author, good writing does not.

Good writers borrow, great writers steal. —T. S. Eliot (but possibly stolen from Oscar Wilde)

You're only as successful as the last book you published, and you're only as good as the next book you're writing. So shut up and write.

People don't realize you can't copyright a plot," Alessandro said finally. "You can't even copyright a title, and that would be a lot easier to make an argument about.

I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true.

No se es escritor por haber elegido decir ciertas cosas, sino por la forma en que se digan

Academics love to make theories about a body of work, but each book consumes the writer and is the sum of his or her world.

I can change the story. I am the story.

The creative writer uses his life as well as being its victim; he can control, in his work, the self-presentation that in actuality is at the mercy of a thousand accidents.

I work full-time in a used bookstore. I get up. I drink a cup of coffee. I think, The last thing I want to do is write. Then I go to the computer and write.

Poetry is the work of poets, not of peoples or communities; artistic creation can never be anything but the production of an individual mind.

I've gotten a lot of livid letters about the awfulness of my work. I've never known what to make of it. Why do people bother to write if they hate what I do?

I always work from an outline, so I know all the of the broad events and some of the finer details before I begin writing the book.

Currently I am working on another three books, doing a lot of magazine work, am shooting for fifteen stock agencies, plus my own photo library - all this keeps me quite busy!