Quotes About Authorship

Writing is the lonely sport of sad sacks.

Being a writer means crying over the sad parts, even though you already know it's going to be okay.

I will be sufficiently rewarded if when telling it to others you will not claim the discovery as your own, but will say it was mine.

The surprising thing about this paper is that a man who could write it would.

As to writing another book on geometry [to replace Euclid] the middle ages would have as soon thought of composing another New Testament.

When I was a young writer if you went to a party and told somebody you were a science-fiction writer you would be insulted. They would call you Flash Gordon all evening, or Buck Rogers.

Mathematicians do not write for the circulating library.

I publish things that in my judgment are good science.

Mary Shelley may well have invented science fiction. I think she did! But after that it seemed to be a boys' game.

I find writing extremely difficult. I usually have to drag myself to my desk, mainly because I doubt myself. And it's getting harder because I want to improve with every book. Sometimes I guess it's best just to forget there's an audience and just write like no one will ever read it at all.

Writing is the great invention of the world.

if you want your name to be remembered after your death either do something worth writing or write some thing worth reading

I have the same fantasy every time I read a book I love, no matter who wrote it, no matter when it was written. That the author has written his book only for me.

Maybe authors shouldn't write more than one or two books. Maybe you just keep writing the same book over and over anyway.

for which he had to pay "1 panegyrick poem every year." That is Homeric rent.

say, 'There never was such a person as Homer,'" the English essayist Thomas De Quincey joked in 1841.

She had typed A Murder of Quality under protest, but this time she declined, so David had to rely on the Embassy secretaries instead. In a letter to Ann written in June, he complained that 'the new book drags along but the girls are all away and there's no one to type it'.35

It feels like Salinger wrote The Catcher in the Rye in a day, and that incredible feeling of ease inspires writing. Inspires the pursuit of voice. Not his voice. My voice. Your voice.

Writing a book has about it some of the anxiety of telling a joke and having to wait several years to know whether or not it was funny.

As a writer one is allowed to have conversations with oneself. What is considered sane in writers is made for the rest of the human race.

Can there be any greater pleasure than to come across an author one enjoys and then to find they have written not just one book or two, but at least a dozen?

She found that after she had written something down, she was happy. Happy as if she had been reading. And it came to her again that did not want to simply be a reader. A reader was next door to being a spectator where as when she was writing she was doing. And doing was her duty.

Life is God's novel. Let him write it. — ISAAC BASHEVIS SINGER

T]he truth is I write by ear, always with difficulty and seldom with any exact notion of what is taking place under the hood.