Quotes About Authorship

A simple creature unlettyrde. Julian of Norwich called herself. The most unlearned and uninformed female who ever dared to be an authoress. Echoed Jane Austen—four hundred years afterward.

don't expect a magic formula that'll make books fall out of your head and automatically give you a wide readership.

It really is torture to sit around the house and write all day. I'm thinking it might motivate me to finish the book faster, the thought that after it's finished I can return to housecleaning. The

I left the store determined that when and if it was ever my turn and I was the author seated at that table, I was going to engage people until they grew old, or at least thirsty. Well, all right, then, they'd say, looking past me for the nearest exit, let me let you go. I would see them until they wilted.

The motor of fiction is narrative. The motor of essay is thought. The default of fiction is storytelling. The default of essay is memoir. Fiction: no ideas but in things. (Serious) essay (what I want): not the thing itself but ideas about the thing.

I am the sole author of the dictionary that defines me.

It's such a confidence trick, writing a novel. The main person you have to trick into confidence is yourself. This is hard to do alone.

Writing is routinely described as creative —this has never struck me as a correct word. Planting tulips is creative. To plant a bulb(I imagine, I've never done it) is to participate in some small way in the cyclic miracle of creation. Writing is control.

More people have read Hurston's works since 1975 than did between that date and the publication of her first novel

ignorant editors and a smothering patron—produced the sort of dependence that affects

If Wright, Ellison, Brown, and Hurston were engaged in a battle over ideal fictional modes with which to represent the Negro, clearly Hurston lost the battle. But not the war.

When a book goes well, it abandons me. I am the most abandoned writer in the world.

The truth is, I hadn't grown up really wanting to be a writer. The whole thing was a weird aberration in some ways, and I didn't feel personally connected to the level of success I had with it - the success of sorts, I guess.

I try to picture my books being acted out.

'An Unquiet Mind' wasn't hard to write in terms of the actual writing of it.

Even if you plan your book, the actual writing is unplanned.

Really, I've worked my whole adult life at fiction, to try and write fiction.

What I've done is I've started writing a novel, so that's my big adventure.

You write what makes you laugh, and you hope that the audience agree, and so far they do.

I know a lot about words. I get paid to write stories, so I get to talk with people about the meaning behind words all day.

One has to be ambitious to start writing.

I write the books to amuse myself.

One day I was talking about what I was going to do next, and just found myself announcing it: 'I'm going to write a book about my father.'

I still think of things for 'Jill' all the time. It's annoying, because I want to be able to find another character who I could write for indefinitely.