Quotes About Authorship

I started writing to please myself, a story I would like to read, and that is still true.

I don't ever write with a particular audience in mind. I just write books that please me.

I used to read about people who'd say, 'I dream my books, and then I write them down.' And I was like, 'Oh, please.'

You know... the only person I really had to please after a point was the MPAA. Because Lions' Gate was like, hey, whatever you can get away with is fine, we don't care.

I have never written for an audience. On the other hand I do not write merely to please myself.

I find writing extraordinarily difficult and not very pleasurable, though I find having done it very pleasurable. I won't lie about that.

There's lots of different ways of writing stuff and lots of different mindsets to have, but I think when it's your own creation, it's more pleasurable because you have total control.

I like to write. I love to write. But I write just for myself and my own pleasure.

I don't believe for one moment you can write well what you wouldn't read for pleasure.

People talk about the pain of writing, but very few people talk about the pleasure and satisfaction.

There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a writer, but not one that suggests how, if you want a normal life, you might reverse the process.

I bristle at the implication that only with the help of a Big Six editor does a novel lose its self-indulgent aspects. Before the advent of self-publishing, there were plenty of self-indulgent novels on the shelves.

I just focus on getting the first scene right, with a few lines about the overall plot, and then the book grows organically.

The idea that I'm going to have to sit down to write some fiction where I'm going to have to think of a plot would really scare me, because it would come out a mess.

I never make notes; just a few small details when I'm writing, but nothing much. The plot is never written down. I will tell the story to myself, but I won't plan it. I'll speak the narrative in my head for a while.

For me, plot always comes out of character, so I had to be sure of my characters.

I tried writing out a plot with the second or third novel I wrote, and it was so boring, so desperately boring.

I was commissioned to write some romantic fiction, and I really liked doing those, and they were very instructive in terms of building characters and plots. But it never felt right for me.

I'm not like Jonathan Hickman, who's able to sort of plot out three years of a book ahead of time. I'm much more of a guy who plots out an arc or two at a time.

I got $30 from Nation magazine for a poem and $500 for my first book of poems.

There's not too much difference between writing a picture book and writing a collection of a hundred poems or so, except that the bigger books take a lot longer to do.

Then, of course, there are those sad occasions when a poet or a writer has not grown, and one has to let them go because they're just not making headway. But we have a very clear personal relationship with the authors.

But here's the thing: what you do as a screenwriter is you sell your copyright. As a novelist, as a poet, as a playwright, you maintain your copyright.

Well, I still write poetry, but I wouldn't call myself a poet.