Quotes About Authorship

It's never easy to adapt a book, especially as the author, because it's as if you're chopping off appendages. It really feels painful to decide what has to go.

They give me the money, I give them the book. Having input into the adaptation would be kind of like selling a house and coming back three years later and saying, 'Paint it this color!'

I haven't written a brochure yet. It's killing me. I know I have a brochure or pamphlet in me yet.

I had a respected SF writer call me 'girlie' and demand that I get him a coffee, before the panel we were on together.

Sometimes I panic and think I can't really write.

When I first started writing, I did mostly short fiction, and I'd work on a short story and get near to being done and have no idea what I'd work on next, and then I'd panic.

Routinely, when I finish a book, I think 'What will I do? Where will I get an idea?' And a kind of low-level panic sets in.

Books arrive in my head all at once, and then it becomes an 18-month process of getting it all down on paper.

I can still put down some pretty nasty stuff on paper, which is what I enjoy doing.

I have files, I have computer files and, you know, files on paper. But most of it is really in my head. So God help me if anything ever happens to my head!

Not intending to be funny: I sit at the keyboard, put my fingers on the keys and go. To me, it's the real secret of writing. Put yourself in front of the screen or the blank sheet of paper and get to work.

I can really write what I want. I can take time; I can do nothing for a year. That is paradise.

I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.

I started writing half a paragraph of a mystery novel, half a paragraph there, and they were terrible.

As I sat in a small room constructing what seemed to me awkward sentences and paragraphs, McCone was out having exciting adventures.

There are writers whose first drafts are so lean, so skimpy, that they must go back and add words, sentences, paragraphs to make their fiction intelligible or interesting. I don't know any of these writers.

I always have a rough outline, but I'm shocked at how little I actually follow it. Those characters keep doing things that I never expected. I think if I crept up to my keyboard and peeked, they'd be talking about things behind my back. Okay, that's a little paranoid and delusional... but just a little.

The way I found time to write 'The Imperfectionists' was that I took work as a copy editor at the 'International Herald Tribune' in Paris, working full-time for approximately six months, then taking my savings from that and writing full-time, then returning after six months, and so on, until the book was done!

It feels blessed to me. Because I go to comic cons, and people come up and they say, 'You're the reason I ride a motorcycle. You're the reason I became a mechanic.' And there are people who love 'Scream' and 'The Waterboy,' 'Royal Pains,' 'Parks & Rec,' 'Arrested Development.' And now 'Barry.' And then there are kids who only know me as an author.

We must not end up with further division by just reinforcing factions in the party, Parliament or the country.

The difference between being a part-time writer and a full-time writer is like the difference between dating someone and living with them. Some of the romance is gone, but you learn things you'd never know just by dating.

I don't write for a particular audience.

The way that I write novels in particular is I don't usually outline; I just write. Part of the fun is discovering what's happening in the story as I'm going along.

This does make me very very careful, particularly in the second draft, to get it right, because you do feel that somebody in the future who may be extremely important for everybody, is going to have me behind them, and this is a responsibility, a huge one.