Quotes About Authorship

Every book, every editor, every teacher will tell you that the great key to success in authorship is originality

If, with the literate, I am Impelled to try an epigram, I never seek to take the credit; We all assume that Oscar said it.

We can none of us say why this thing, or that thing. The book was done written when the characters were born.

When the idea comes, I often can't remember where it came from. I remember very little about writing the first series of Hitchhiker's. It's almost as if someone else wrote it.

It makes a difference whether Moses or Jeroboam writes the history curriculum.

Aside from your name on the cover of the book, your voice should be your most distinctive signature.

We have a great array of choices before us, and it is our glory to choose between them. But there is one choice we do not have, and that is the choice to be the author of the story.

It has often been said there's so much to be read, you never can cram all those words in your head. So the writer who breeds more words than he needs is making a chore for the reader who reads. That's why my belief is the briefer the brief is, the greater the sigh of the reader's relief is. And that's why your books have such power and strength. You publish with shorth! (Shorth is better than length.)

No matter what you do, somebody always imputes meaning into your books.

Writing is a solitary occupation.

If you own this story you get to write the ending.

I write about relationships and I try to create real-life characters.

More than a half, maybe as much as two-thirds of my life as a writer is rewriting. I wouldn't say I have a talent that's special. It strikes me that I have an unusual kind of stamina.

Life takes its own turns, makes its own demands, writes its own story, and along the way, we start to realize we are not the author.

From the very beginning, I wrote to explain my own life to myself, and I invited any readers who chose to make the journey with me to join me on the high wire.

If you don't write your books, nobody else will do it for you. No one else has lived your life.

I think language beautifully full of the poetry of immanent clarification of some small pinprick of what living might mean. Fuck. Why else would anyone care to spend a life writing sentences?

reserved. This book is protected by the copyright laws of the United States of America. This book

That's the hard work of writing. The imagining.

Subsequent history is written as if these normative positions were the product of social consensus rather than of conflict

I have several writer friends, but I don't involve them in my work process. I'm more likely to talk about the business of publishing with them.

I know that books I have written will still resonate in 50 years - particularly 'My Sister's Keeper.' It has sold three million copies in the States alone. I strongly feel that, as a novelist, you have a platform and the ability to change people's minds.

muddled insides of his head, or perhaps his soul. He'd been writing the book for almost five years, but he'd done so in

to the enjoyments of a writer of romance, conscious of inventive power. If in the mere perusal of novels we lose our painful sense of the realities of "this unimaginable world," and delightedly participate in the sorrows, the joys, and the struggles of the persons, how far more intensely must an authoress like Mrs. Radcliffe feel that outgoing of the heart, by which individuality is multiplied, and we seem to pass a hundred lives!