Quotes About Authorship

My advice to authors would be to try to do something original rather than to try to anticipate what the market is looking for.

'Sabotage' was a work for hire. It wasn't my original idea or script or anything.

Every director has a sensibility and style, and what works is his originality and conviction.

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

I didn't originally intend on writing a book. I started writing during the day to feel like I was accomplishing something creative.

'Oscar Wao' for example cohered in a period of terrible distress. All the novels that I wanted to write were not happening.

People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children's book. I say, 'If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children's book', but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you're directing the story to is anathema to me, because, in my view, fiction is freedom and any restraints on that are intolerable.

It doesn't matter what kind of book you write - you ought to write it well and with some kind of style and elegance.

I think on our first two movies we weren't really writing for anybody else above us and that's not to say that movies aren't ours in the way we want them to be in terms of the scripts.

I never do a full outline, and if I did, I would not feel bound to it, because the view from inside a scene can be different from the view outside it. But neither do I just start writing and see what happens; I am far more disciplined than that.

I never know what's going to happen in a novel. I don't have a plan or an outline.

I am a big outliner. For my adult book, 'The Visibles,' I did not outline, and it took me two years to write because I just didn't outline, and I had no path.

I cannot outline. I do not know what the next thing is going to happen in the book until it comes out of my fingers.

I really don't keep an outline; I don't organize in any way. I just write.

Since I don't outline my books very much, I feel like sometimes I don't have a choice in what the characters do; they just kind of take over sometimes.

I do better just letting the stories develop. I don't outline very well, and I can't follow it if I do. Once I've outlined it, why write the damn book?

Many writers will get a contract by selling chapters and outlines or something like that. I wrote the entire novel, and when it was all finished, I would give it to my agent and say, 'Well, here's a novel; sell it if you can.' And they would do that, and it was good because I never had anyone looking over my shoulder.

I make extensive outlines before I write a book. I usually know what will happen. I know the characters, and I know what they are about.

I like the freedom of novels. With the memoirs, I always had to keep to the facts. I like that with novels, if I want to go off and write something quite dramatic or outrageous or something completely different, I can do it if I want to.

I believe in creative control. No matter what anyone makes, they should have control over it.

With my book 'How to Remodel a Man,' I was on Oprah, Fox News, the Early Show, and Good Morning America. Oprah was the best - an hour long segment. TV is so short; you answer a few questions, and then it's over. It feels like a hit-and-run with a camera.

I look at the plotline and let my co-author basically write the book; first draft. Then they give it to me, and I totally destroy it and write all my stuff over it.

Dr. Barazon had maintained that Elfriede would not have needed to provide an Aryan cover for the real author of Ali and Nino, because the book contract was signed in April 1937, almost a full year before the Nazi Anschluss of Austria.

I wanted to read a book with a good ending so I wrote one.