Quotes About Authorship

I want to write a book about shoes that's full of footnotes.

More people are leaving TV behind to read my books than ever before. In the last year alone I gained over two readers (three, to be exact). So I'd like to take a moment and say thanks mom, dad, and kidnap victim I keep chained in the basement

I am proud, and more than a little excited, to be asked to work with Faber in an editorial capacity. It is my dearest hope that we will produce some fantastic books together.

On Writing Well by William Zinsser The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E. B. White Revising Prose by Richard Lanham

la mitad de una novela la pone el que la escribe, y la otra mitad el que la lee.

Writing novels allows the novelist to spend much of his time in a fictional world, which is really the only or at least the most bearable place to be.

In fact, nothing can be imposed on a writer of fiction, who doesn't need to ask permission to introduce any real person or sequence of events he happens to know about into his fiction; if he decides to, then nothing and no one can prevent him. We aren't trustworthy people and some of us are heartless, though I don't think I am.

While an author is yet living we estimate his powers by his worst performance, and when he is dead we rate them by his best.

Writing is like masturbating when you have just masturbated. It's not fun. But it has to be done, or else people would not have anything to read while they sit on the toilet.

He hasn't written a line for twenty years. A line of what? What kind of literature can one keep corked up for twenty years? Wade surprised him. The real kind, I should say.

Another d-mn'd thick, square book! Always, scribble, scribble, scribble! Eh! Mr. Gibbon?

If a story is only what it seems to be about, then somehow the author has failed.

When I sit at my table to write, I never know what it's going to be until I'm under way. I trust in inspiration, which sometimes comes and sometimes doesn't. But I don't sit back waiting for it. I work every day.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

I have never met a writer who didn't need an editor, and an editor without a writer is a person without a job. It is a fraught and often-imperfect relationship, of course, dating back to the beginning of time. You remember; after God moved upon the darkness, he proclaimed, "I've put in place some very wondrous illumination here!" And Mrs. God gently suggested the more pithy: 'Let there be light.

Having screwed around the last hour trying to decide whether to write in the style of Isaac Asimov (that version featured Caitlin as a Venusian chick with one eye and three breasts) or Dr. Seuss ("I am Nick/Nick is sick/Nick tells Debbie to…" well, you get the idea)

Writing is work. Anyone can do this, anyone can learn to do this. It's not rocket science; it's habits of mind and habits of work.

PhD, MFA, self-taught—the only things you must have to become a writer are the stamina to continue and a wily, cagey heart in the face of extremity, failure, and success.

That afternoon, I tried to understand if I had made a choice about what to write. But instead it seemed to me if anyone had made a choice, the novel had, choosing me like I was a door and walking through me out into the world.

A perfect judge will read each work of wit With the same spirit that its author writ

He, who supreme in judgment, as in wit, Might boldly censure, as he boldly writ.

Tis hard to say, if greater want of skill Appear in writing or in judging ill

Ten censure wrong for one who writes amiss

Thomas Mann that "a writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.