Quotes About Authorship

I have ventured to write more intimately about my personal life than is customary for a member of the Supreme Court, and with that candor comes a measure of vulnerability.

The fact is: You are not a manager of circumstance, you're the architect of your life's experience.

I think my favorite fact about myself is that I have never been dismayed by a critic's bilge or bile, and have never once in my life asked or thanked a reviewer for a review.

We do not write as we want, but as we can.

Like Elmore Leonard and Donald Westlake and Robert B. Parker and oh so many others, I want to die with my boots on, facedown on my keyboard if possible, in the middle of a sentence.

To make your life being a writer, it's an auto-slavery ... you are both the slave and the task-master.

Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.

John Stuart MillBy a mighty effort of willOvercame his natural bonhomieAnd wrote Principles of Political Economy.

I have almost completed a long novel, but it is unpublishable until my death and England's.

The historian records, but the novelist creates.

She walked about disdainfully, unwilling to be enthusiastic over monuments of uncertain authorship or date.

I was afraid I wrote neither well enough nor ill enough for success.

?nsanlar?n hikayelerini yazanlar evvela ?unu bilmeli: Kaderini yaz?yorsun yaln?z olacaks?n. Hem de hep.

How first you knew me in a book I wrote, How first you loved me for a written line

When I want to write something I just sit down (or stand up) and do it. Scribble, scribble, nothing could be easier. It helps, naturally, to have something to say.

But hell, I do like to write letters. Much easier than writing books.

How become a writer? Naturally.

So I write mainly for the fun of it, the hell of it, the duty of it. I enjoy writing and will probly be a scribbler on my dying day, sprawled on some stony trail halfway between two dry waterholes.

Few sensible authors are happy discussing the creative process -- it is, after all, black magic, and may lose its power if we look that particular gift horse too closely in the mouth.

I have been both overpraised and underpraised. I assume by the time I finish writing -- and I plan to go on writing until I'm 90 or gaga -- it will all equal itself out.

Every character is an extension of the author's own personality.

However, he initially saw no moral issue with Falkland and dismissed any criticism of the work as faux outrage and contended that he was content to attract readers to his works by any means, including controversy. Leslie George Mitchell states that Bulwer-Lytton, or just Bulwer as he was known at that time, considered his poetry to be his finest work and wished to increase its readership through his novel writing and reputation.

I [Paul] am… a Jew of Tarsus, a city in Cilicia, a citizen of no mean city.

Écrire est un plaisir et une corvée.