Quotes About Authorship

Usually, by the time I hit 'save' before taking a nap, my word count has gone down, but the world I'm creating feels more tangible than it did before.

Writing seems like the only job where what you think and feel really matters.

There's a big difference between us. I write non-fiction, you write fiction. I write truths that tell lies. You write lies that tell truths.

Prologue When I began writing this story, I thought I had some idea of what it was about. I was wrong. In my life writing I've discovered that there are times when a story, like architecture, is carefully designed, erected, and furnished. Then there are tales that take their own way, and I find myself being dragged along after them like a white-knuckled water skier behind a speedboat.

I'm a woofer, not a tweeter; a writer, not a telegrapher; an essayist, not an aphorist.

Sleep with Seth Mortensen? Good grief. It was the most preposterous thing I'd ever heard. It was appalling. If I absorbed his life force, there was no telling how long it'd be until his next book came out.

If you dont like my book write your own.

When you're old enough to write a book for children, by then you'll have become a grown up and have lost all your jokeyness. Unless you're an undeveloped adult and still have an enormous amount of childishness in you.

For me, the pleasure of writing comes with inventing stories.

Heinlein's Rules for Writers Rule One: You Must Write Rule Two: Finish What Your Start Rule Three: You Must Refrain From Rewriting, Except to Editorial Order Rule Four: You Must Put Your Story on the Market Rule Five: You Must Keep it on the Market until it has Sold

You have to give an editor something to change, or he gets frustrated. After he pees in it himself, he likes the flavor much better, so he buys it.

Who can possibly be as deeply inside a story as the person who writes it?

Milton said once, poetically, that whoever murders a book, murders a man. Psychologists would mostly agree that that is symbolically true. Destroying a book, like the psychotic behavior of slashing a photograph, expresses rage at the person who wrote the book or the person in the photo. One cannot help wondering, at this point, about those who burned the books of Dr. Reich or conspired to suppress the books of Dr. Velikovsky.

The difference between a great writer and a minor one is fundamentally this: that the minor writer always has answers—glib answers, slick answers, memorably-worded answers, resounding and pretentious answers. The great writer dares to stand before you naked, armed only with his questions.

This book dates from 1972-73, and the man who wrote it does not exist anymore. Even I, occupying the same body that he did, hardly remember him and quite often do not agree with his opinions at all, at all. I have therefore corrected and updated his ideas in about a hundred places because, frankly, he embarrasses me at times, especially since we share the same name as well as the same body.

I am a writer of books in retrospect. I talk in order to understand; I teach in order to learn

I may as well confess myself the author Of several books against the world in general.

Writing is always a process of discovery - I never know the end,or even the events on the next page, until they happen. There is a constant interplay between the imagining and shaping of the story.

I consider my novels, amongst many other things, to be my political activism.

To write things down as luck wasn't the same as writing them off as non-existent or in some way beneath consideration.

Ship, lady. This here's a ship," he said defensively, as if she'd told him, "Your penis: I find it minuscule.

Oh, I wonder if I shall ever be able to do anything worth while in the way of writing.

I enjoy the Web site a lot and I like being able to talk to my readers. I've always had a very close relationship with them.

Writing for a penny a word is ridiculous. If a man wanted to make a million dollars, the best way would be to start his own religion.