Quotes About Authorship

I think writing well takes a little bit of talent and an awful lot of work.

Most every book I bring into the world is like birthing a baby; it's a lot of effort!

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

I think it's a very bad idea for someone to start writing for a readership.

And it's always possible that you will not get a nice review. So - and that's enraging of course, to get a bad review, you can't talk back, and it's sort of shaming in a way.

Writing is one of those jobs that everyone has an opinion on. I don't think this is a bad thing.

If you make a book which is little more than putting a television script on the page, and add a few pictures, that would be a bad thing. But I would never do that because I happen to be very interested in language, in writing.

If I'd learned nothing else, it was this: If you want to be a great writer, be a man. If you can't be a man, write like one.

I can't even say I've begun yet, but I'm trying on the idea that there is a book in my future.

All writers behave badly. All people behave badly.

Nobody believes this, but I write very fast.

The author of the document would one day come to believe that it was sacred scripture and that his writing desk was a holy object.

Pages and pages and pages with words all over the pages. My goodness, what fun. What fun to write whatever words occur.

This evening I begin a notebook. If anyone reads this, I trust they will forgive my overuse of I. I can't stop it. I'm writing this.

the novel is a liberal form…and the act of fiction writing is a performance of sympathy with people you are not .

Some of the most influential novels of recent years, by Rachel Cusk and Karl Ove Knausgaard, take the method of self-conscious first-person testimony to a new level. Their more extreme admirers will tell you that imagination and invention are outmoded contrivances; that to inhabit the subjectivity of a character unlike the author is an act of appropriation, even colonialism; that the only authentic and politically defensible mode of narrative is autobiography.

We admit the presence of no author, no oeuvre, and no genre. The text stands bare. . . . We admit nothing outside of the text.

delinease en un papel, Y aparecen en la figura de esta página. Le dije que, aunque en Europa los sabios tenían la costumbre de robarse los inventos unos a otros, y de este modo lograban cuando menos la ventaja de que se discutiese cuál era el verdadero autor, tomaría yo tales precauciones, que él solo disfrutase el honor íntegro, sin que viniera a mermárselo ningún rival.

When a writer dies, he becomes his books.

A writer always begins by being too complicated—he's playing at several games at once.

Tres suertes puede correr un libro de versos: puede ser adjudicado al olvido, puedo no dejar una sola línea pero sí una imagen total del hombre que lo hizo, puede legar a las antologías unos pocos poemas...

Publicamos para não passar a vida a corrigir rascunhos. Quer dizer, a gente publica um livro para livrar-se dele

Quando um indivíduo cria algo, digamos, uma composição musical, um romance, uma pintura, um filme, um vídeo, esse indivíduo se torna um autor, quer dizer, alguém que é capaz de deixar marcas, traços de seu modo próprio de criar mensagens em um processo de signos com o qual lida. O autor é aquele que interfere de modo particular e pessoal em um processo de signos.

In literary practices the idea of a single subject is also all-powerful. It is uncommon for books to be signed. The concept of plagiarism does not exist: it has been established that all works are the creation of one author, who is atemporal and anonymous. The critics often invent authors: they select two dissimilar works - the Tao Te Ching and the 1001 Nights, say - attribute them to the same writer and then determine most scrupulously the psychology of this interesting homme de lettres...