Quotes About Authorship

I understand that there is a writer named Jonathan Franzen, but I have not read him.

practically every word ever written about Jesus of Nazareth, including every gospel story in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, was written by people who, like Stephen and Paul, never actually knew Jesus when he was alive (recall that, with the possible exception of Luke, the gospels were not written by those after whom they were named).

Nunca nadie hizo jamás buena literatura con historias familiares. Regla de oro para los escritores debutantes: si escasea la imaginación, hay que ser fiel a los detalles.

IT TAKES SOME temerity to publish, in a new edition, a book written more than thirty years ago.

By the way, Doc Edwards said. How's that book coming along? Oh, it's coming along. Fine. What's it about? Just what I'm writing down: one word after another. Good.

The fact that something is written down is persuasive to people not used to asking questions like: 'Who wrote it, and when?' 'How did they know what to write?' 'Did they, in their time, really mean what we, in our time, understand them to be saying?' 'Were they unbiased observers, or did they have an agenda that coloured their writing?

The book owes something (and vice versa) to the two-part television documentary Root of All Evil?, which I presented on British television (Channel Four) in January 2006. I am

You can't write ... on the strength of influence. You can only write a good story or a good novel by yourself.

Houses can have this almost authorial power over us, seeming to ruin or make perfect our lives just by persisting in one place longer than we can. (In either case it's a power worth defeating.)

Writing may be an art, but it is certainly a craft.

Writing is making choices, and the choices we make can be generic, which will cost us our reader's faith, or specific, which will gain our reader's trust. Detail allows us to communicate precisely what we mean.

Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there's powerful evidence to the contrary

perhaps the sweetest moment in writing is the arrival of that idea for a book which never has to be written, which is never sullied with a definite shape, which never needs to be exposed to a less loving gaze than that of its author.

I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn't recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.

We argued for weeks about the existence and then the location of a particular semicolon

In order to write the book you want to write, in the end you have to become the person you need to become to write that book.

Gud skapte mannen før kvinnen. Det er sånn som når jeg skriver. Først kladder jeg.

Describing the relationship between the biblical witnesses and the theologians who come after, the author challenges that the theologian is not to correct the notebooks of the biblical writers like some high school teacher. Instead, our theology is always subject to what THEY say, as we willingly submit our notebooks for their approval.

Next to doing things that deserve to be written, nothing gets a man more credit, or gives him more pleasure than to write things that deserve to be read.

I didn't choose to write a military man as much as Vince Haven chose me.

Given the books of a man, it is not difficult, I think, to detect therein the personality of the man, and the station in life to which he was born.

There is no book so poor that it would not be a prodigy if wholly made by a single man.

It has been said that to write is to live forever. The man who said that is dead.

The more a man writes, the more he can write.