Quotes About Authorship

In our day the conventional element in literature is elaborately disguised by a law of copyright pretending that every work of art is an invention distinctive enough to be patented.

I never work from an outline, and often I dont know how the story will end.

In the past the publishers I've worked with have been extremely generous. And in almost every case, have been people who believed in the work rather than the sales and marketing.

I hardly ever work from a synopsis -- I find they act like chains.

Can't nothing make your life work if you ain't the architect.

So, I am independently well-off and don't have to do anything, but I still do. I write books, lecture around the world, work with scientists and governments.

What began the change was the very writing itself. Let no one lightly set about such a work. Memory, once waked, will play the tyrant.

Writing is hard work, but a lot of fun, too. It allows me to live out some of my fantasies.

I feel like, as a filmmaker, I'm at my strongest when I write the script and when it comes from me, out of whole cloth. My best work has always been self-generated.

I love to write, so it rarely seems like work - even when it gets arduous.

There is probably some long-standing "rule" among writers, journalists, and other word-mongers that says: "When you start stealing from your own work you're in bad trouble." And it may be true.

It takes me three months of research and nine months of work to produce a book. When I start writing, I do two pages a day; if I'm gonna do 320, that's 160 days.

I think that all my books are political, I think that I have a political body of work. I am essentially a political woman, but above all I am a poet. I am a poetess.

I won't work on anyone's else's script. I won't write for anyone else. I write my own stuff and make that when the time is right.

I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365. So the pages accumulate and then I publish the books.

If you don't keep and guard and mature your force, and above all, have time and quiet to perfect your work, you will be writing things not much better than you did five years ago.

I have always felt like an artist when I work on a book. I see no reason why the word should always be confined to writers of fiction and poetry.

[A writer] should try not to be too far, personally, below the level of his work.

You call this a script? Give me a couple of 5,000-dollar-a-week writers and I will write it myself.

Now I'm trying to work outside first person. I do plan to write more books.

You work hard on a book and throw it out there and then it's beyond your control.

What a labour writing is ... making one sentence do the work of a page; that's what I call hard work.

I think, for me, when I direct my own work it's just an extension of the authorship.

Most written work is a conversation between the editor and the writer, that the writer essentially fulfills in public, and the editor provides the stage for that to happen as well as the prompts.