Quotes About Authorship

book, banging in the full stops until it looked as if he would break his pen.

He writes because for him doing so is a luxury, the more agreeable and conspicuous the fewer who but and read what he writes.

He writes because for him it is a luxury which becomes the more agreeable and more evident, the fewer there are who buy and read what he writes.

An author doesn't have the moral right to violate truth and take refuge in the claim that he/she is only a creative artist.

In the end, you write the book that grabs you by the throat and demands to be written.

Until you know who you are you can't write.

As we will see, it did not succeed. In this way Pampa learned the lesson every creator must learn, even God himself. Once you had created your characters, you had to be bound by their choices. You were no longer free to remake them according to your own desires

The world of books continued to send him messages. Bharati Mukherjee and Clark Blaise wrote from America to tell him that people were making I AM SALMAN RUSHDIE button badges and proudly wearing them as a sign of their solidarity. He wanted one of those badges. Maybe Joseph Anton could wear a badge in solidarity with the person he both was and was not. Gita Mehta told him by telephone, a little waspishly, that "The Satanic Verses is not your Lear. Shame is your Lear.

Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. ITALO CALVINO

It was curious that so avowedly godless a person should keep trying to write about faith.

I cannot take credit for the fact that I do not have the soul of a psychopath.

It is time we admitted, from kings and presidents on down, that there is no evidence that any of our books was authored by the Creator of the universe.

It is generally argued that our experience of free will presents a compelling mystery: On the one hand, we can't make sense of it in scientific terms; on the other, we feel that we are the authors of our own thoughts and actions.

On the strength of his literary output alone... any woman of sense would decline to tackle D.H. Lawrence at 1,000 pounds a night.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.

If there is any secret to my success, I think it's that my characters are very real to me. I feel everything they feel, and therefore I think my readers care about them.

There's a word for a writer who never gives up: published.

Do you wait for things to happen, or do you make them happen yourself? I believe in writing your own story.

It is actually a lot harder to sit down and write from A to Z. But for me at least, it's the only way I can do it, at this point, with any moderate success.

Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.

I had my success too soon. Three books published with Scribners in New York before I was 30.

I'm not an overnight success. My early publishing history, through my first five books, was unfortunate in many respects, typified by a couple of short anecdotes.

One of his peculiarities was never to speak a word of French, which he however wrote with great facility.

Siempre tuve más miedo a una pluma y a un tintero, que a una espada o a una pistola.