Quotes About Authorship

You must have control of the authorship of your own destiny. The pen that writes your life story must be held in your own hand.

Books are the ultimate way for writers to reach immortality.

A writer in the act of writing must fear neither his own words nor anything else in the world. A writer who is afraid is no true writer.

If writers were good business men, they'd have too much sense to be writers.

When you are a free and independent writer, without employer, without hours or deadlines, you have to play little games to force yourself into the actual writing. For me, one game is to announce...that I have finally decided on my next book, that I am ready to write it...to put my pride on the line.

When I was a little boy, they called me a liar, but now that I am grown up, they call me a writer.

A well-read writer, with good taste, is one who has the command of the wit of other men; he searches where knowledge is to be found; and though he may not himself excel in invention, his ingenuity may compose one of those agreeable books, the deliciæ of literature, that will out-last the fading meteors of his day.

But I did not want to be good. I wanted to be a writer.

I start with a tingle, a kind of feeling of the story I will write. Then come the characters, and they take over, they make the story.

How is it possible to defeat not the authors but the functions of the author, the idea that behind each book there is someone who guarantees a truth in that world of ghosts and inventions by the mere fact of having invested in it his own truth, of having identified himself with that construction of words?

The only books I recognize as mine are those I must still write.

What if it were as they say? If, while I believe I am writing in fun, what I write were really dictated by the extraterrestrials?

Will I ever be able to say, "Today it writes," just like "Today it rains," "Today it is windy"?

And a keen jealousy invades me, not of other people, but of that me made of ink and periods and commas, who wrote the novels I will write no more, the author who continues to enter the privacy of this young woman, while I, I here and now, with the physical energy I feel surging, much more reliable than the creative impulse, I am separated from her by the immense distance of a keyboard and a white page on the roller.

I have to say that most of the books I've written and those I have it in mind to write originate in the idea that writing such a book seemed impossible to me. When I'm convinced that a certain type of book is completely beyond the capacities of my temperament and my technical skills, I sit down at my desk and start writing it.

Let us move forward in thought to three thousand years from now. Who knows which books from our period will be saved, and who knows which authors' names will be remembered. Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; others author's names will still be known, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps, all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer.

Il primo libro sarebbe meglio non averlo mai scritto. Finché il primo libro non è scritto, si possiede quella libertà di cominciare che si può usare una sola volta nella vita, il primo libro già ti definisce mentre tu in realtà sei ancora lontano dall'esser definito; e questa definizione dovrai portartela dietro per la vita, cercando di darne conferma o approfondimento o correzione o smentita, ma mai più riuscendo a prescinderne.

Some books will remain famous but will be considered anonymous works, as for us the epic of Gilgamesh; others author's names will still be known, but none of their works will survive, as was the case with Socrates; or perhaps, all the surviving books will be attributed to a single, mysterious author, like Homer.

The author was an invisible point from which the books came

je tam také pokus o báse? vÄ›novanou ... mouÅ¡e. Kdybych nevÄ›dÄ›l, jak se vÄ›ci mají, Ã…â"¢ekl bych, že ty verÅ¡e sepsala nÄ›jaká ctihodná sle?na, která tyká tvor?m, o nichž pÄ›je; ale protože jsem ji složil já, nezbývá mi než v??it, že byl-li jsem já schopen n??eho takového, pak už je každý schpen vÅ¡eho.

I am a writer, not a transcriber.

Of course, for whatever is amiss in these pages (and there will be much), the blame is mine. But permit me to be grateful if anything in them is true.

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it.

I just write what I wanted to write. I write what amuses me. It's totally for myself. I never in my wildest dreams expected this popularity.