Quotes About Authorship

I don't write drafts. I write from the beginning to the end, and when it's finished, it's done.

I just finished my 11th book last week, so I'm ready to start the next one.

Well, I am becoming doddering and old but I have - I'm writing two books a year now. It's like 220,000 words or something like finished, and, honest to God, I can't do that. I really do need the help of, you know, other people working with me.

When I sit down I write very fast... if I haven't finished a book in two or three months then I think it's not going well.

I don't read my books, I write them. Once I've finished the many years it usually takes me to write them, I can't bear to read them, because I've spent too long with them already. I'm not advertising them very well, am I?

Lots of shows are written completely in the writer's room. And I wouldn't say 'The Walking Dead' is that way. There are three levels to it. There's us in the room. The writers going off by themselves. And me working with the writers on a finished script.

I finished 'America America,' and I knew I had to write another book, not just for personal reasons but because I had a contract.

Here's the secret to finishing that first book. Don't rewrite as you go.

My first job is to write the characters as full and authentic people as well as I can.

One of the big breakthroughs, I think for me, was reading Robert A. Heinlein's four rules of writing, one of which was, 'You must finish what you write.' I never had any problem with the first one, 'You must write' - I was writing since I was a kid. But I never finished what writing.

It almost seems I was writing two separate books, the first one about the time before I went on the court and the second one about the many, many terms I was on the court.

Sometimes I can spend as long revising a manuscript as I spent writing it in the first place.

My Life in CIA is the first time that I've ever written a story in my own name.

First-person narrators is the way I know how to write a book with the greatest power and chance of artistic success.

I like to write first-person because I like to become the character I'm writing.

I always start a book thinking that it can be something other than first-person present, and I always come back to first-person present. It's just the easiest way.

You always want to go out there with the best book possible, so I listen to what my editors say, and even if they don't know how to fix it, I always seem to find a way. 'Trust Your Eyes' is the best book I've written, and I don't know if I can do any better.

Even in 'The OA,' we had to follow Guild requirements and put 'directed by' and the credits, and I'm embarrassed to put my name every time. I mean, who cares. Look it up on the Internet if you want to know who made it.

I don't for one second think about the possibility of censorship when I am writing a new book. I know I am a person who cares about kids and who cares about truth and I am guided by my own instincts, and trust them.

The stage gives you more control over your own work; in television, there's a distressing amount of communal writing. Unless it's your show, you have no control over that. You're at the mercy of whoever's running the show.

Miller is not really a writer but a non-stop talker to whom someone has given a typewriter.

I haven't been the kind of writer about whom book-length academic studies have been written.

If you're writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author's views rather than about the character's.

I remember certain lines and whose they are.