Quotes About Authorship

If you want to make a little money, write a book. If you want to make a lot of money, create a religion.

I respect Millar, sir: he has raised the price of literature.

Writers feel like a middleman, standing with pen in hand over the page. A force greater than me stands above telling me what to write. That may sound romantic, but that's how it feels.

If circumstances should make it impossible (temporarily, I hope) for me to be a Russian writer, perhaps I shall be able, like the Pole Joseph Conrad, to become for a time an English writer... ("Letter To Stalin")

At first, writing actually felt the more arduous of the two activities. But in order to reach cultural-center nirvana, I forced myself to continue. I was young then and it was no easy matter to persuade my bottom to maintain such constant intimacy with my chair

I knew when I was writing The Angel's Game that a lot of people would be upset that I didn't write Shadow Of The Wind 2. That's okay, that's part of the game. You do what you have to do. If they like it, great. If they don't, too bad. What are you going to do?

I was always fascinated by the fact that you could take paper and ink and create worlds, images, characters. It seemed like magic.

All of these things considered, it is not surprising that one can detect echoes, correspondences and even an eternal return or two within the work of a single author. The passage of time does bring changes, yea and alas; but still, I would recognize myself anywhere.

I never plan ahead, with the exception of the Amber books which had to proceed in sequence. But I don't really like to know what I'm going to be working on a year in advance. So I just sign blank contracts for books and whatever strikes me as a good idea is what I write about.

When I finished the first draft of Death Will Get You Sober, I joined Sisters in Crime and, later, Mystery Writers of America. After that, it was a matter of doing a lot of revision, sending out hundreds of queries over several years, and applying "talent, persistence, and luck"--sometimes known as "persistence, persistence, persistence."

I spent fifteen years working for various publishers editing text and reference books, including a beautifully edited but mind-numbing accounting textbook. That didn't get me any closer to being a published novelist, though it made me a crackerjack editor.

I first said I wanted to be a writer at the age of seven. It took longer to get that first novel out than I expected.

My first novel, Death Will Get You Sober, came out on my sixty-fourth birthday--not quite the career path I expected.

Always write to change society for the better. You will go, but it will live as a treasure forever.

Always write to change society for the better. You will go, but it will live forever as a treasure.

You are not responsible for the reader, you're only responsible for what you are writing.

There are no new plots, but there are plenty of fresh new characters with whom you can grab the reader. Characterization is the key to successful commercial fiction. Characterization starts with goal, motivation, and conflict. Character

We do not commit to believing what the biblical writers believe; we commit to believing what the affirmations of the biblical text are.

La vie est toujours ce que vous faites de lui. il ne peut pas être le vôtre si vous permettez aux autres d'écrire sur les pages blanches de l'annuaire de la vie. vous devez prendre en charge et mener votre vie comme vous le croire il se doit, avec les valeurs que vous croyez. commencer à écrire les chapitres de votre livre de vie avec vos propres mots merveilleux, pas dictées par d'autres. Bonne chance!

My writing may not necessarily represent either my state of mind or my personal sentiments as of writing those thoughts - because I strive to be objective and well-balanced spectator of the situation, rather than enforcing my personal standpoints to my readers. I believe that such approach does a best justice to the subject matter. Objectivity is always the key!

When I meet people, I no longer say "Hi, I'm Derek Landy, pleased to meet you." Now I say "Hi, I'm number one bestselling author Derek Landy. Worship me.

Even as she'd been writing it, she wondered if she was using too many exclamation marks, but she was glad she left them in. Nothing says "all is good in the world" like exclamation marks, after all.

skulduggery pleasant is the best book I've ever read and has enspired myself to become an author.

To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge-and therefore, like power.