Quotes About Authorship

I am a better novelist than a poet, playwright, or essayist.

I thought that if one wanted to be a writer, one had to write novels because I didn't know that one could be a poet.

All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire or a Viennese cafe-society writer who died after stabbing himself in the foot.

I'm a huge fan of Toni Morrison. I just think she's so incredible. And also Nayyirah Waheed, who's a poet.

I know I'm not a wordsmith. And I don't write poetry. Sometimes I think I should, because it's really helpful. But I always wanted to write novels.

One of the things women poets have been engaged in - among the other things they've been doing - is revising parts of the poetic self. Re-examining notions of the authority within the poem, and of the poem.

Not many poets have editors.

Cut out all these exclamation points. An exclamation point is like laughing at your own joke.

I know what I want to achieve in each book and the major points, but I don't plan right down to the chapters. I think that the characters write themselves in some degree.

A lot of my favourite books - I should say, not much happens in the books! It's much more about the points of view of the author more than anything else.

For myself, I feel more natural writing stories or novels than writing plays. I feel more like myself, like I can express myself better, and like I have a greater clarity about what I want to do.

I can't write if someone else is in the house, not even the cleaning woman.

I don't care what they do with my book so long as the flippin check clears.

I do three things: speaking or teaching, which I enjoy the most, coaching is where I learn everything, and writing is where I reach people.

Without coffee, nothing gets written. Period.

I'm probably one of the few authors in this country who could very comfortably live off my writing.

Writing 'Dog Stars' was coming home. My spirit just sang. It's what I wanted to do my whole life.

I don't want to be a commentator of my own work. If you've written the story, you've said what you want to say.

As someone with a novelistic background, I just didn't have much interest in creating stories by committee. I don't think you necessarily get the best story through that approach.

I love essays, but they're not always the best way to communicate to a larger audience.

If people would write exactly what I wanted to read I wouldn't feel so compelled to write myself.

As a writer, my only responsibility is to tell a compelling story.

I don't think one can write from a compromised moral position.

My identity is based around being a writer. I can't not write. It's a compulsion.