Quotes About Authorship

It would appear, from the best examples, that the proper way of beginning a preface to one's work is with a humble apology for having written at all.

Of all the excellent copyedits I've received over the years, Marie-Lynn Hammond's was by far the best. Her work on Half Blood Blues was incredibly sensitive and astute.

I never can understand how two men can write a book together; to me that's like three people getting together to have a baby.

I have never admitted the right of an elderly author to alter the work of a young author, even when the young author happens to be his former self.

I work for two years on a book and it comes out and two days later I've got my first e-mail: When is the next one coming out?

There are a lot of decisions to make, creatively. Now, with digital, you can really be the author of your own work. From the beginning to the end of the process, you control everything.

As many have noted, the peril for authors is that our work space is too easily our play space.

Writing a biography is not a love affair. It's not a marriage. It's a job, it's a piece of work.

Curiously, the United States is full of writers who have one big work in their life and that's all.

If there is a category of human being for whom his work ought to speak for itself, it is the writer.

I think it's difficult to be honest about certain aspects of my work without acknowledging that I have experienced or felt or questioned certain of the themes in the books.

It's really important to me to keep growing as a writer, to look for new challenges and be harshly critical of my own work in order to learn and tell better stories.

Generally you don't initiate the projects - they're designed and you're inserted. Your material is edited by somebody. You feel a lack of power over your work.

I think as an artist or a writer it's OK to want to control your own work.

I have a number of writers I work with regularly. I write an outline for a book. The outlines are very specific about what each scene is supposed to accomplish.

I only work on my books at nights and at weekends. It is really just like a hobby.

Whatever a writer gets paid for his book, it's never enough. I think that's true. It's hard work. But in the end, you wrote a book. It's something real and tangible that sits on a shelf forever.

That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.

I've done very well financially and sold a lot because I've had a multiple method of attack as a writer. That's a conscious strategy.

People are used to streaming and binge-watching. When they see an author they like, if there's only one book, even if they like the book, they're going to forget about you. The way to keep you in their mind and to get you to become a habit for these readers is you have to have a lot of product out there for them to read.

I kind of like to write fast. It keeps the pacing up. And it keeps me off the streets.

One of my strengths as a writer is that I'm a good problem-solver. I write these unthinking, ungoverned first drafts. The project for me always is to turn that instinctive stuff into pages that work.

To me, stretching the capabilities of my imagination is a crucial aspect of writing fiction; you could think of it as a mental form of athleticism.

Your first book is kind of a labor of ignorance. You don't realize the difficulty of it. Your second book is sort of a labor of fear. Then you sort of either hit a stride, or you don't.