Quotes About Authorship

The Duffer Brothers are so attentive to story and detail while being wildly respectful of me and what I bring to the process.

I'd love Shakey Bill to tell me a story - I mean, William Shakespeare, he could squeak a nib couldn't he?

I've done a lot of Shakespeare onstage, and I'm not convinced that the Earl of Oxford was the author of all those works, but I am convinced that the Stratfordian William Shakespeare was not. My feeling is that it was an amalgamation of many writers, in the same way that most films are a collaborative endeavor.

I knew William Burroughs really well, and I was always star struck being around him. I adored him.

I consider William Gay one of the great writers that no one has ever heard of.

The quality of films out there depends on how much responsibility we're willing to take. I try to play women who are positive and heroic.

I always tell people there's only one trick to writing: You have to write something that people are willing to pay money to read. It doesn't have to be very good, necessarily, but somebody, somewhere, has got to be willing to pay money for it.

Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to 'gamble' on an unknown.

I dreamed about this as a kid, that I would write - and people would read - a whole series of books. I feel accomplished, giddy, and tired. Mostly, though, I feel thankful. A trilogy is a huge investment on the part of author, publisher, and reader, and I'm grateful that so many people were willing to invest along with me.

I've been willing to go for years without publishing. That's been my career.

I guess if one set of my books was selling like Stephen King's, and the other wasn't selling at all, editors would want me to do the ones that sold like Stephen King's. But they seem to be willing to let me pick what I want to do next.

Books fall from Garry Wills like leaves from a maple tree in a sort of permanent October.

I was told that the fact that I had nothing but good things to say about Judith Regan distinguished me. I enjoyed writing for Judith. I really enjoyed working with Victoria Wilson at Knopf, and Simon & Schuster, they've all been great experiences.

I've always found it best to have a routine. I go to my study at the same time every day and climb into my bay window. I may not be inspired every day, but on the days I am, I need to be in place to write. If I'm not particularly inspired, I'll revise or do research or correspondence.

'Dandelion Wine' became one of the few books that I returned to time and again, and while not anywhere near the story crafter as Mr. Bradbury, I hope I managed to absorb by osmosis some of his techniques.

When I was starting out, William Goldman took me under his wing, and he's still the person I show pages to.

I've always written a little bit. I mean, I've written screenplays, and I've doctored my dialogue for years, and I've written speeches - I was a speechwriter on 'The West Wing,' so I like that kind of thing. But I never really thought I'd write a book.

Due to the sweeping time frame and the voices moving back and forth, the outline for 'The Invention of Wings' was the strangest one I've ever done. I created six large, separate outlines, one for each part of the book, and hung them around my study.

Winning the Pulitzer is wonderful and it's an honor and I feel so humbled and so grateful, but I think that I'll think of it very much as the final sort of final moment for this book and put it behind me along with the rest of the book, as I write more books.

Writing books and being paid for it - it's not like winning the Lottery. You can't suddenly go, 'Yippee!' and start throwing tenners in the air. I've done pretty well out of it, but certainly not enough to say, 'Right, that's me set up for life.'

I spend a huge amount of time writing about the book instead of writing the actual text.

After I work with my editor to get the manuscript in good shape, I sketch and lay out a whole book loosely, usually in black and white. You learn things about your text when you have to think about pacing and page-turns.

If I'm going really, really fast, I can do a page of finished text a day, on average.

Then one day I thought it would be wonderful to make a whole book, to make my text and my drawings together, and that's how I started doing children's books.