Quotes About Authorship

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it's imaginary. You don't have to pretend it's not a book. We don't have to pretend that people don't write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn't the only way to do it. Once you're writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

I had no real idea I was going to become a writer. It was just a game for me. I just liked pretending, daydreaming and imagining.

Shakespeare said pretty well everything and what he left out, James Joyce, with a judge from meself, put in.

The story was such that I couldn't make a graceful ending and then make a graceful new beginning. I could have, but I didn't want to. So, it isn't the most graceful way of writing a story. This new story is, I think, is pretty good stuff. I'm pleased with it anyway.

I like writing my own material - I'm pretty good at it.

When people come up to me and say, 'I read your book,' I'm thinking, 'How dare you! Who gave you a copy?'

When I first started out writing the 'Darkness' books, there was, at least in my mind, a certain sort of rulebook we had to follow.

If you're going to write a book that might, in its very best accidental career, sell 30,000 copies, you've got to have a day job.

I work at night, starting at around 10 o'clock and working until 2 or 3 in the morning. I do that usually five days a week. In Berkeley, I have an office behind our house that I share with my wife, who works more in the daytime.

I don't see myself as an artist, as a writer. The sort of writing that I do, which is popular fiction, it's work. I have contracts to fulfil, and I have deadlines to meet.

It usually takes about a year to write each book. I don't plan it that way. I don't set deadlines. If a book wants to take longer, it can.

I may not want to write every day, but I have no choice - there are deadlines to meet.

I have represented people in book deals.

The books are like children in that having written one doesn't make writing the next one any easier, because it's a new set of problems and a new set of challenges with each one, and having dealt with one before means that you now know how to do it.

I said to Ruth Rendell, 'When you've written as many books as you have, it's easier.' She said, 'No dear, it gets harder'.

I have known Farley Mowat all of my life, from reading his books as a child to becoming a close friend of his over the last three decades.

I always feel very afraid as I work on books. It's just so hard to write a decent book!

When I went to college I took a creative writing class and decided in a week to be a writer.

I actually own a copy of my own book; that's how dedicated I am as an author.

I always knew, deep down, that I'd love to be an author, but I don't think I really thought about trying to do it seriously until it was time to leave school and consider what I'd do next.

I'm not one of those deeper, ethereal writers. I'm just trying to get it done.

If you look at the body of any writers' work, you can figure out the questions that animate them. I think that is what real writers do. They don't tell people how to live or what to think. They write in order to try to answer their own deepest questions.

I first wrote for adults, but when I started writing for young people, it was the most creative and liberating experience of my life. I was able to express my own deepest feelings far more than I ever could when writing for adults.

I don't remember a time when I didn't define myself as a writer.