Quotes About Authorship

I write every day weekdays for about 5 hours, mostly longhand on legal pads. It has gotten neither harder nor easier, sadly or happily.

If somebody has a better idea than me, I'll take it if it surpasses what we have on the page because at the end of the day, it's me that takes the credit anyway!

When I write a book, I write very cleanly from page one to the last page. I hardly ever write out of sequence.

Getting an idea for a book is not the problem, but you need 300 ideas - an idea a page.

You have to understand that while I pre-plot the meta story of a given book, I often have no idea of what will happen on the next page, let alone the next chapter. That's what makes it fun for me; I write the books the same way many people read them.

When I'm writing I just think there's only the page and me and nobody else.

When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.

One of the humbling things about having written more than one novel is the sense that every time you begin, that new empty page does not know who you are.

If I knew a story page by page before I started writing it, I just wouldn't do it. The process of discovery is really important for my own enjoyment.

The good news, when you write with another, is that you never have an empty page in front of you. The bad news is... you never have an empty page in front of you.

Plays are not written but rewritten, and much of the rewriting takes place at the behest of the director, whose job it is to grapple with the myriad complexities of moving a play from the page to the stage.

When I think about the books I've written, it probably takes 150,000-200,000 words to get a 50,000 page book. Highlighting something and hitting Cmd-X is second nature.

I outline fairly extensively because I'm usually dealing with real events. I don't need to give myself as much information as I used to, but I still like to have two pages of outline for every projected 100 pages of manuscript.

My goal is two pages a day, five days a week. I never want to write, but I'm always glad that I have done it. After I write, I go to work at the bookstore.

I'd like to meet fewer people who say 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 10 pages I've written,' and more 'Oh, I want to write a book, here are 300 pages I've written.'

Writing is agony for me. I work at it eight hours every day, hoping to get six pages, but I am satisfied with three.

There are writers, and I know some of them, who are very disciplined. Who write, like, four pages a day, every day. And it doesn't matter if their dog got run over by a car that day, or they won the Irish sweepstakes. I'm not one of those writers.

Inspiration is easy. The hard part is getting the inspiration onto 300 pages in an interesting, cohesive, easy-to-read but hard-to-forget story.

When I'm working on a book, I try to do eight pages a week. That seems like a good amount. Less than that, I'm not getting a nice momentum, and more than that, I'm probably putting out too much crap.

If I got paid, it was no more than five dollars a column, and I still think I was overpaid.

Writing is finally play, and there's no reason why you should get paid for playing.

I've learned to really love revision over the years and worked hard to build up my craft muscle to make my revisions less and less painful with each book.

My first novel didn't sell well. It was really painful and humiliating and shocking to me.

There was a special challenge in describing the awful childhood of a person who happens to be my own husband. It was very painful at times, for both of us.