Quotes About Authorship

I tell my students that being a writer is like being a member of a medieval guild and that what we are doing is very subversive and very important.

My early novels were written in quite a dark place. I stand by them, but I would never write them again. I think it is subversive to embrace emotional optimism, because it goes against the grain.

Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

The reason is that they define how I have gone about my business. I have trusted to intuition. I did it at the beginning. I do it even now. I have no idea how things might turn out, where in my writing I might go next.

When I learnt to write I became my own master, I became very strong, and that strength is with me to this very day.

I'm the kind of writer that people think other people are reading.

As the author of a work, I don't relinquish author-ity to just any critic, particularly not to people whose work I've not read or don't respect; those biased by envy are the least relevant, and grounded grammarians who strangle or sterilize under a banner of superiority are a close second.

My mom was dying for me to write a book, she was my biggest advocate.

There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.There wasn't a persona or an attitude that I could reliably write good stuff from.

In my writing, I strive for a lyrical beauty somewhere between Tolkien at his best and Seamus Heaney's translation of Beowulf.

Really, when I write a book I'm the only one I have to please. That's the beauty of writing a book instead of a screenplay.

I cannot choose one hundred best books because I have only written five

The best advice on writing I've ever received was from William Zinsser: 'Be grateful for every word you can cut.'

I am a creature of my pen. My pen is the best of me.

Certainly the best works, and of greatest merit for the public, have proceeded from the unmarried, or childless men.

The best way to become a writer is to go off and write.

My first true lesson in writing came from Mr. Bowden when I was 16. At my high school, he was the teacher known to be the very best at literature and writing.

The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.

A translator is to be like his author; it is not his business to excel him.

Writers are in the entertainment business, and it gives me lots of pleasure to entertain my readers.

No... a novel is a long business. I'm a slow writer, even when I'm doing very well I write slowly.

An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.

This strange business of what it is to be a writer is this increasingly insane world in which we live, in which surrealism, it seems, is the new realism.