Quotes About Authorship

Durante más de doce años, Bruce Patton ha colaborado con nosotros en redactar y explicar todas las ideas de este libro. El año pasado se hizo cargo de la difícil tarea de volcar nuestro pensamiento conjunto en un texto con el que estuviéramos todos de acuerdo. Es un placer darle la bienvenida a Bruce, editor de la primera y coautor de esta segunda edición.

You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.

Writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin.

The modern writer (scriptor) is born simultaneously with his text; he is in no way supplied with a being which precedes or transcends his writing, he is in no way the subject of which his book is the predicate; there is no other time than that of the utterance, and every text is eternally written here and now.

The author enters into his own death, writing begins.

All this means in fact that one believes oneself to have such sureness of intelligence that acknowledging an inability to understand calls in question the clarity of the author and not that of one's own mind.

The writer is the prey of an inner god who speaks at all times, without bothering, tyrant that he is, with the holidays of his medium. Writers are on holiday, but their Muse is awake, and gives birth non-stop.

I'm not trying as a writer to be smart or to understand the inner workings of my narrator, I'm trying to survive the typing of this story.

Pierpont not only reorganized roads but locked up their future financing.

It was the launch of an unprecedented career. (He would go on to publish more books than any other author, according to the 2006 Guinness World Records, with 1,084 titles.)

I maintain that any writer of a book is fully authorised in attaching any meaning he likes to a word or phrase he intends to use. If I find an author saying, at the beginning of his book, Let it be understood that by the word 'black' I shall always mean 'white,' and by the word 'white' I shall always mean 'black,' I meekly accept his ruling, however injudicious I think it.

Hammett used to be irritated by that and would answer that nobody ever deliberately wrote a potboiler, you just did the best you could and woke up to find it good or no good.

St. Bernard said, 'Every word one writes smites the Devil.

It may be that I have sought to cultivate that trait in myself to such a high degree because I think of myself primarily as a writer. The chief satisfaction in the whole business of writing, it seems to me, comes down to saying what is, or what you think is.

I really have reached a point where I can write a book about all of this.

There comes a point in your life when you need to stop reading other people's books and write your own.

In any of my pages in any of my books may life a perfect account of my secret experience of the world.

For every traveller who has any taste of his own, the only useful guidebook will be the one which he himself has written.

The writer proposes, the readers dispose.

It would be wonderful, she thought, to write a book which would help other people.

Writing, he'd come to see, was the spiritual disease of which it considered itself to be the cure;

Do you think that, if I did, I would lead you to the answer inch by inch, like a dramatist or a novelist?

It might seem that you shouldn't worry about what readers feel they're either going to feel what you want them to feel or not. But that way of thinking surrenders too much to chance. It leads to the erroneous idea that emotional effect is accidental. While it's true that you cannot control what each reader will feel while reading your work, what you can control is whether they will feel something in the first place and how strong those feelings will be.

The text of the Bible means what God inspired it to mean, not "what it means to