Quotes About Authorship

Don't concentrate on becoming a better humor writer, just concentrate on being the best writer that you can become. If you're funny, the work will end up being funny. And if you're not funny, the work will still end up being good. Concentrate on being the most honest writer you can be, and let everything else follow--because it will.

The hardest thing about being a writer is convincing your wife that lying on the sofa is work.

The way you define yourself as a writer is that you write every time you have a free minute. If you didn't behave that way you would never do anything.

I'm sure I'll have more to say about the penis word.

Ruth Cole was a novelist; novelists are not at their best when they go off half-cocked. She believed that she would prepare what she was going to tell the police - preferably in writing.

I have digressed, which is also the kind of writer I would become.

You're the biggest secret I know...The only way I know what's going on with you is the only way everyone else knows it. I just have to wait and read your next book.

the memoir-novel "dumbed down fiction and traduced

No, it's never easier. The new book doesn't know the first four were ever written.

Every difficult work presents us with a choice of whether to judge the author inept for not being clear, or ourselves stupid for not grasping what is going on. Montaigne encouraged us to blame the author. An incomprehensible prose-style is likely to have resulted more from laziness than cleverness; what reads easily is rarely so written...

It was usually on about the fourth day that I put in that note of spontaneity for which I am known.

All there is to writing is having ideas. To learn to write is to learn to have ideas.

My own experience is that once a story has been written, one has to cross out the beginning and the end. It is there that we authors do most of our lying.

No one I know of has ever had this experience-where you had to sit and wait and wait for a DNA test to come back just so you can write the last page of the book.

I enjoy writing but I much prefer the experience of having written.

Experience is an author's most valuable asset; experience is the thing that puts the muscle and the breath and the warm blood into the book he writes.

I'm always looking at ways of shaking up the writing experience because I think it helps.

It is bound to be a failure, every book is a failure, but I do know with some clarity what kind of book I want to write.

My four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

Writing is a leap of faith. But how wonderful that the person you're putting faith in is yourself.

Any one could write a book," said the taxi driver. "Yes, they could, but they DON'T," said Maeve Binchy

My writing is riddled with such tics of uncertainty. I have no excuse or solution, save to allow myself the tremblings, then go back in later and slash them out. In this way I edit myself into a boldness that is neither native nor foreign to me.

Everywhere I go as a writer—especially if I'm in drag as a "memoirist"—such fears seem to be first and foremost on people's minds. People seem hungry, above all else, for permission, and a guarantee against bad consequences. The first, I try to give; the second is beyond my power.)

I can't write that dreadful hobbity stuff. I just simply... can't.