Quotes About Authorship

And before I'd got to the end of the first paragraph, I'd come up slap bang against a fundamental problem that still troubles me today whenever I begin a story, and it's this: where am I telling it from?

Don't force yourself to write. Some people can write a novel in a few months, whereas for others it can take over a year. I'm lucky to be one of the former - but, even so, if I'm not in the mood to write, I won't. I'll go off, do something else and come back to it when I'm ready.

The acting is something that will always be a part of my life, but the writing gives me a lot more creative freedom. You're a pawn in somebody else's chess game, whereas as a writer and as a director, you get to call the shots. And that's very thrilling.

When you're a mass-market writer, people think that you can just decide 'this happens, this happens, this happens', whereas with literary writers it's coming from their soul and their core. But with me it does come from my soul and my core, and my soul and my core often go AWOL, and then I've nothing to write.

How you solve your problems are quite different. In non-fiction, you can always go back to the research, whereas in fiction, you have to go back to yourself - which is a little bit scary.

I'm an everyday guy - I'm a try-to-write-at-least-15-minutes-every-day-if-not-an-hour-or-two kind of guy. I write in Google docs so that wherever you go, you have access to it.

Kindle Singles is publishing on skates. It prints like lightning; our book meets readers in hours. I've spent so many years waiting for publishers to consider whether they wanted to print a book of mine, making contracts, taking months to fit it into the Fall list or the Spring list, fitting it into an advertising plan.

It really was total heaven to be a writer. As a model or actor you are employed on someone's whim. As a writer, you are in control.

It's like these ideas, these characters, kind of bubble up inside me, and one day they're not there, and the next day they are there. They're alive, and they're whispering in my head and all that stuff, and I want to write about those things.

'The Chimney Sweeper's Boy' began differently from any previous book I'd written. It actually derives from a story a friend - the novel's dedicatee, Patrick Maher - told me.

I tend to edit some as I go - partly because one of the reasons I don't outline much is that I don't know what the next scene will be until I've actually written the previous scene.

Shaw's plays are the price we pay for Shaw's prefaces.

Within reason, I can write what I like and spend as long doing it as is necessary. That is a luxury beyond price.

One of the things I do take some pride in is that if you had never read an article about my life, if you knew nothing about me, except that my books were being set in front of you to read, and if you were to read those books in sequence, I don't think you would say to yourself, 'Oh my God, something terrible happened to this writer in 1989.'

I've come to find more satisfaction and enjoyment in writing screenplays over the years because that's what I do primarily now.

Fact-checking doesn't exist primarily because some of us are liars and cheats. It exists because writers will be writers, much as they may mean to be historians.

My primary ambition is to be a fiction writer... Being a critic wasn't an aspiration of mine.

Chiki Sarkar edited 'Mrs Funnybones,' and she is a ruthless but kind editor to work with. The only lesson I learnt during this process was to say, 'Yes, Prime Minister,' and re-write.

After you've written a story, the thing to do is sell it. Sounds simple, and it is, if one will follow certain basic principles of salesmanship.

One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.

I've got a long list of books I wish I'd never written-and I've kept them all out of print for the past 20 years.

Now, past middle age, with so many books written I still care about and only a few still in print, I know the feeling of being overlooked.

Hinde Esther Kreitman is a forgotten literary foremother, her works largely lost, ignored and out of print.

Seeing your work in print is exciting, especially when you're young. It's that feeling that you have some effect on the world outside of your immediate neighbourhood.