Quotes About Authorship

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

I didn't know who I was writing for initially. I assumed 'Miss Peregrine' was for adults, because I was an adult - but I didn't know much about publishing back then.

Publishing is not my world.

Don't sell your publishing.

Don't sign your publishing away.

I love digital books. And I actually started digital-first publishing back in 2005.

I hadn't meant to do the pattern of publishing short stories and then a novel. I thought, 'I'm a novelist. I know it.' But you have to kind of write a lot of bad novels before you can write a good one, I think, so I did that. But meanwhile, I loved the short stories I did.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

When I was doing it, I just thought, 'I'm going to do this because it's fun.' I wasn't writing for a publisher or a publishing model; I didn't really think about it, but then, somehow, it worked out in my favor.

A cool thing about enthusiast press is the low barrier to entry. Anyone can decide they want to set out on this path and start publishing immediately.

I publish my own books, so there isn't a certain editor I owe the book to at a publishing house.

There's a joy in writing short stories, a wonderful sense of reward when you pull certain things off.

Most people who are trying to write kind of sit in their basements and pull it out of their imaginations.

I don't know if I have a memory of not thinking I was a writer - it goes that far back. I went to law school because I didn't know how to earn a living otherwise. I tried to ignore the pull, but it wouldn't let me.

For me to be able to punch above my weight creatively, to actually take a stand for what I was doing, I had to take on everything. I had to be the person who says, 'I wrote it. I directed it.'

Every book I write, the media just keeps punching me in the face.

To some people, the fact that I am not married, or don't have children, would be the reason I have written a book on punctuation.

I don't perceive an audience at all when I write a book. It's pure self-indulgence.

'Purple Plumeria' I dithered over for months and then wrote the whole thing between the beginning of July and end of August. The dithering and procrastination time was three times the writing times.

I've always been very grateful that enough people have enjoyed reading what I've written that I've been able to pursue writing professionally.

The cookbooks and the writing in general have been a real bonus, but it's not something I've ever pursued... I've been lucky, I guess.

If you're a journalist - and I think, on some level, I'm a journalist, and proud to be a journalist, or a documentarian, however you want to describe it - part of what I do has to be the pursuit of the truth.

I tend to push whatever is looking over my shoulder away when I am writing. It's once the box of books arrive that I say I'm going to be pilloried for this or that. But then you realize it's done, and there is nothing I can do. I'm proud of the book.

I first came across the script for 'Macbeth' between the ages of 11 and 12; it was the first book that shook my life. Because I did not yet understand that I could simply purchase it in a bookstore, I copied much of it by hand and took it home. My childhood imagination pushed me to feel like a co-author of the play.