Quotes About Authorship

Heaven knows, I've exposed myself in my novels through the use of fantasy and imagination... now my new book is about what really happened to me... not my heroines.

It's a little bit in the genes because my brother is a journalist and my father was a sports writer.

I just write when fear overtakes me.

I never discuss a novel while I'm writing it, for fear that talking about it will diminish my desire to write it.

The vehemence with which certain critics have chosen not simply to criticize what I've written, but to challenge my writing this story at all, speaks of what the book is about: fear of disapproval.

For me, just showing up for the traveling and writing gave me the power to overcome my fear of fear.

When writing the story of your life, don't let anyone else hold the pen!

Don't let anyone else hold your pen if you are writing your story.

Until now, I had reckoned only that I had not the 'gift' for writing; now M. de Norpois took from me the ambition also.

side. When she tries to explain her passion for it he reminds her how Anthony Trollope wrote all his books after a hard day's work at the Post Office.

Está pretendiendo que todo se repita en una historia imaginada no por usted sino por Bioy Casares.

It's one of the many reasons that I go to sleep and wake up with thoughts of authorship. Who writes our stories? Who chronicles our tales of cooking it, playing it, writing it? Baldwin, Gordon, the Apollo, Jacob Lawrence, Paul Mooney, James Brown, Malcolm - that's my neighborhood. Why wouldn't I want to cook for the people who lived there?

Who holds the ultimate responsibility for the story? The writer or the reader, the reader or the writer . . .

What you are saying and the way you are saying it are very closely linked. I discovered that I always had to let the book I was writing find its own style. Only in that way can you be sure that you are doing the right thing by your subject matter. It's a strange feeling -- as if the book has a life of its own.

In the very books in which philosophers bid us scorn fame, they inscribe their names

I believe that books must go through a fairly slow birthing process...

I believe that an author who cannot control her characters is, like a mother who cannot control her children, not really fit to look after them.

Men like women who write. Even though they don't say so. A writer is a foreign country.

A wonderful thing one learns when one writes about imaginary kingdoms for a living is that, in fact, anyone can imagine anything, and if the writer is good, they can do it persuasively.

This edition will also carry a new title. Formerly known as The Draconeia (a name assigned to it by Lord Gleinleigh), it will now be issued under the title Turning Darkness Into Light . It will be available for sale on 13 Nebulis, only one week after the original intended date.

As if a cookbook had anything to do with writing.

I always was going to be a writer. The other jobs were just to keep me in food. Though I enjoyed the archaeology.

Freedom begins the moment you realize someone else has been writing your story and it's time you took the pen from his hand and started writing it yourself.

The writer doesn't need economic freedom. All he needs is a pencil and some paper.