Quotes About Authorship

When anything goes digital, let alone something as immaterial as a book, there is a tendency to see it as just in the air to be taken, and to lose the sense that somebody once made it.

I have a tendency to face my bad fantasies in my books.

The occasional motivational speech gig tends to pay better than the books and television.

One of the differences between what happens when an author and a gossip columnist sit down to write a book is that the former tends to make every effort at disguising and protecting their sources, while the latter doesn't particularly care.

I don't think of myself as a metafictional writer at all. I think of myself as a classic writer, a realist writer, who tends to have flights of fancy at times, but nevertheless, my feet are mostly on the ground.

Whatever the readers feel when they're reading my books, I feel it tenfold when I'm writing it.

In 2007, I sold my first book, 'Grimspace.' It says it's SF on the spine. I believe it to be SF, though it's certainly written differently. I write in first person, present tense, and the protagonist is a woman with a woman's thoughts, feelings, and sexual desires.

I get really tense during the first draft. Really tense. That's not great for my family, because the first draft usually takes about a year.

The common wisdom is that only about 1 percent of a novelist's research ends up in his or her book. In my experience, it's even less - closer to a tenth of a percent.

I think 90% of my ideas evaporate because I have a terrible memory and because I seem to be committed to not scribble anything down. As soon as I write it down, my mind rejects it.

I never even dreamt of being a writer because I didn't feel allowed. When I was a child I was terribly ambitious, but I didn't know at all what this great thing would become.

If you look through the shelves of science books, you'll find row after row of books written by men. This can be terribly off-putting for women.

The first draft often is really fast, and I'd be terribly ashamed if anybody ever saw it.

I had never read Upton Sinclair. I didn't read 'The Jungle' in high school or anything like that. But it's pretty terrific writing.

If you can actually get someone to sit on the edge of their seat and feel nervous if there's a knock at the door, then you've done something pretty terrific as a writer.

No one inspired me to write, but writer Harlan Ellison terrified me into getting published.

Companies that are terrifying to a writer are companies like Amazon.

I don't know the literary world; I was scared of being confronted with famous names, not knowing what they had written. It was occupied territory I was entering.

'Love and Terror on the Howling Plains of Nowhere' took me six years to write.

When I wrote 'Kidulthood,' I didn't even know there was going to be a 'Kidulthood.' I just wanted to test myself to see if I could write a script.

Writers Are Insane. For months we are lone wolves locked in our caves. Then overnight we become publicity hounds. It's a schizophrenic business.

When people read his books they have an uncontrollable desire to hang the author in the town square. I can't think of a higher honor for a writer.

yo me gano la vida escribiendo, muchachos, les dije, en este país de la chingada Octavio Paz y yo somos los únicos que nos ganamos la vida de esa manera.

To ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.