Quotes About Authorship

I don't believe in personal immortality; the only way I expect to have some version of such a thing is through my books.

The first version of The Beautiful Room Is Empty was the first mss. I'd ever submitted to New York editors.

If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write. —Stephen King

Someone once asked him why he didn't just use a tape recorder or at least type answers into a computer or tablet. His response: Speaking or typing creates just a glancing relationship with the words. Only when you write by hand do you truly possess them.

When you write something by hand, slowly, you own the words. You type them, less so. You read them, even less. And you listen, hardly at all.

His best work bore the stamp of John O'Hara and John P. Marquand.

She thought a writer should work harder writing a book than she did reading it.

Luce even analyzed my prose style to see if I wrote in a linear, masculine way, or in a circular, feminine one.

Life and Letters (New York: Knopf, 1972); and John E. Washington, They Knew Lincoln (New York: Dutton, 1942). Of course, no work was more important than Elizabeth Keckley's own memoir, Behind the Scenes (New York, G. W. Carleton & Company

For months I'd been writing, holed up in my bedroom, or doing the clichéd thing of bringing my laptop to a neighborhood coffee shop, where I was surrounded by my more attractive peers, the ones who carried on long, loud telephone conversations in which they used the words my agent as often as possible, and did everything but prop tip cups and WRITER AT WORK signs

The job of the writer isn't to answer questions. The job of the writer is to ask the questions for which there are no answers.

if my name was on a serious work like this it would never get fair treatment. They would all say I had tried to be funny and failed.

I resolved, when I began to write this book, that I would be strictly truthful in all things; and so, I will be, even if I have to employ hackneyed phrases for the purpose.

I write when I feel like it, and I feel like it most of the time.

Be patient. Be bold. Be humble. Be confident. Don't give in to the speed and surface banality of the culture. Don't give in to jealousy, commerce, or fear. Do charity work, or coach kids, or be a Big Brother or Sister, or something. Whatever it takes to get out of your own head and avoid authorial narcissism. And whatever you do, don't ever take advice from authors.

This is what happens when your life is authored not by God, but by David Mamet.

Personally, I think it deplorable to place the words and opinions of others on the book jacket. I want the first words read by the reader of my book to be written by me.

Levi is one of the best authors I've ever read. It's hard not to have an immediate personal response to his work. He has such a quiet tone.

I would say readers can trust my work more than anyone else's.

In fact, since no one's been interested in my work, I took the responsibility recently to invest in my own work, so I'm producing a concert that was done at the Vision Festival in May.

I wrote Sophies World in three months, but I was only writing and sleeping. I work for 14 hours a day when Im working on a book.

Though I revise constantly as I write, I will usually revise much of the work again after I've reached the ending.

The great thing about being a writer is that you have a long, perhaps frighteningly long time in which to do your work.

I wring my hands because I know that as a dude, my privilege, my long-term deficiencies work against me in writing women, no matter how hard I try and how talented I am.