Quotes About Authorship

I don't teach writing classes anymore, and I'm really glad I don't, because I would feel very strange about telling people, 'Go out there and be a writer, and make a living from it.'

Sometimes I think I'm a one-trick pony because I'm not very inventive about new ways of telling stories.

A book comes and says, 'Write me.' My job is to try to serve it to the best of my ability, which is never good enough, but all I can do is listen to it, do what it tells me and collaborate.

If God tells me to write another book, then I will.

Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.

Anyone who tells you they don't need to rewrite, they're usually the ones who need it worst.

Every writer must find a way of writing that tells the reader: This is me and no one else. The Voice can be idiosyncratic, but it cannot be obscure. It is a blend of style and content and intent and rhythm and pure personality.

It is only a moment here and a moment there that the greatest writer has.

After all, the real question is not whether the Bible is inspired, but whether it is true. If it is true, it does not need to be inspired. If it is true, it makes no difference whether it was written by a man or a god.

Fancourt can't write women,' said Nina dismissively. 'He tries but he can't do it. His women are all temper, tits and tampons.

I said that the greatest female writers, with almost no exceptions, have been childless. A fact. And I have said that women generally, by virtue of their desire to mother, are incapable of the necessarily single-minded focus anyone must bring to the creation of literature, true literature. I don't retract a word. That is a fact.

Frankly, anybody who's going to kill themselves because of a bad review has no business writing a novel in the first place.

So I've been forced to the conclusion," said Strike, "that the Bombyx Mori everyone's read is a different book to the Bombyx Mori Owen Quine wrote.

Na ja, bei ihm heißt Chard 'Phallus Impudicus', und ..." [...] "Er heißt 'unzüchtiger Pimmel'?

Robert Galbraith

My family and I would never receive royalties on the revenue that my materials brought into the church materials that were created on our own personal time.

You see, I believe that you cannot be taught to 'write.' You can be taught grammar and punctuation, but you cannot be taught to be a writer. That has to come from within.

No one disputes that seeming order can come out of the application of simple rules. But who wrote the rules?

Anxious, inexperienced writers obey rules. Rebellious, unschooled writers break rules. Artists master the form.

Anticipatory plagiarism occurs when someone steals your original idea and publishes it a hundred years before you were born.

Exceptional estimable, good, nice, dear people they all were but they all, unluckily, kept asking me about the new novel, and that was excrutiating.

When you write your first novel you don't really know what you're doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first 'Once upon a time'. I'm not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them.

A writer who isn't writing isn't really alive.

1) the Muse visits during, not before, the act of composition, and (2) the writer takes dictation from that place in his mind that knows what he should write next. -from a review by Roger Ebert of film Starting Out In the Evening (2007). http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/p...