Quotes About Authorship

It is hard work to give life to new characters every single day. It is not as if I am God. I am just a tired, middle-aged woman trying to keep going.

I think so often, especially if the work is perceived of as being drawn from life, the woman, not her book, is reviewed.

I think I'm very strong at dialogue, I think I'm very strong in characterization. I think sometimes I use dialogue and character work to cover weaknesses in my plotting.

You know, there are those writers who work at writing every day. I'm not one of those guys. I tend to work at varying levels of intensity, based on the amount of time and energy I have available.

Its impossible to control the reception of your work - the only thing you can control is the experience of writing itself, and the work you create.

Fundamentally I think we all write the kinds of work we'd most like to read. Or we try to.

I decided to work on hand animate because the animators work as authors in every little scene and it brings real soul for characters.

Writers learn their craft, above all, from the work of other writers. From reading.

I laugh when I'm writing. I feel like all my work is funny to me.

Making sure that the geography and timelines work is always the hardest part of writing. But you owe it to the readers to get it right!

Novel writing is solitary work.

For me now, it's about what you would write and what you wouldn't write, and that's how I select what I am going to do. It can be quite nice being brought a concept by a studio for me to work on.

When you're rereading or editing your book and you start to expect that this work is going to be reviewed, and you can sort of tell which line is going to show up in reviews.

Sometimes I'll hear a phrase or a word and write it down in my little black notebook (a writer's best mate), then come back to it and work a plot around it.

My first published novel, American Rust, took three and a half years of full-time work to write. But I wrote two apprentice novels before that.

The two things I enjoy the most about writing are the first page of a book and the last. What's in between is very hard work.

If I spend a year and a half writing a script, the first year will be outlining in notebooks. It's just the way I work, definitely not necessarily the best way.

I pay editors. I never ask friends or colleagues to work for free.

Publishers have in-house editors, but I hire my own before I submit the work to publishers. They appreciate it and I feel more confident about the material.

'All Our Yesterdays' was unquestionably the best work I have ever done. And the reading public stayed away in droves.

I've always been a writer, actually. Not many people assume that, but I kinda keep quiet about anything that I do until I'm ready to show it. It keeps me humble and also makes me work towards a goal.

When I'm writing a book, sentence by sentence, I'm not thinking theoretically. I'm just trying to work out the story from inside the characters I've got.

The work of a correct and regular writer is a garden accurately formed and diligently planted, varied with shades, and scented with flowers.

I look upon this as I did upon the Dictionary: it is all work, and my inducement to it is not love or desire of fame, but the want of money, which is the only motive to writing that I know of.