Quotes About Authorship

I have no problem selling books to media franchises and we do it all the time. The author must understand that he/she is a writer for hire and has no control over copyright or over editorial changes made to the text.

My first book deal was actually for a textbook - 'Judo and You' - that I wrote while teaching at Temple University. A scout for Kendall-Hunt came looking for someone to write the book, and even though it wasn't a course I was teaching there, I agreed to write it.

If you are making money writing, you are doing great. If you can support yourself writing, you are a success. I don't care if you're writing textbooks or Pulitzer Prize-winning articles for weighty publications of world renown: If you're writing and it's paying the bills, consider yourself a successful writer.

Digital books and other texts are increasingly coming under the control of distributors and other gatekeepers rather than readers and libraries.

I never did, and I never will, thank any man for altering any one word of my compositions without my privity.

Basically, I always wanted to be an author but went through all these other jobs while getting up the nerve to finally go for it with my writing! Thank goodness it worked; who knows what I might have done next?

I thank God I was a reporter before I became a writer.

Writing might be unalloyed joy, were it not for the fact that power is always shadowed by responsibility. Thankfully, the absolute power that writers have is not weighted down with absolute responsibility. It can neither be suppressed nor diminished, except by choice.

I own all the characters I created, thanks to the Writers Guild, so nobody can do anything without me. The way it works is: If the copyright owners instigate a project, like the movie, then I get a fee as creator. If I instigate a project, like the musical, I pay a percentage to the copyright owners.

I'm given a lot of credit with opening the doors for Christian fiction. It was kind of a difficult field when I got into it... But I don't feel like a king.

'Scream' was the first thing he'd ever written that had gotten made, and I'd been in Hollywood for less than two years.

Every writer has written a spec. It's the first thing you write, and it basically stands as a means of, 'Here's an example of how I tell stories.' It's almost like a business card.

For me, the easiest thing to figure out is the story I want to tell, and the hardest thing is to figure out the voice that's gonna tell it. And that's why I finish very little.

For me, the hardest thing in the world is how to start a book.

The hardest thing writers have to do is figure out for themselves who they are. What should they be writing about? What stories should they be telling? What does writing mean to them? I didn't know the answers to those questions for a long, long time.

The field of the novel is very rich. If you're a composer, you're well aware of the history of composition, and you are trying to make your music part of that history. You're not ahistorical. In the same way, I think, if you write now, you are writing in the historical context of what the novel has been and what possibilities it has revealed.

To have been able to write the books I wanted to write, on demanding subjects like war and the history of psychiatry, and for them to have sold in the numbers they have - and then go around saying: 'Actually, I'd also like to have won the Costa Book of the Year?' That would be ridiculous.

The one thing I would like more credit for is being part of a movement which involves recognising the importance of plot and asserting that books of literary worth could be written that had plots.

The one thing about being a dude and writing from a female perspective is that the baseline is, you suck. The baseline is it takes so long for you to work those atrophied muscles - for you to get on parity with what women's representations of men are.

I love 'Gabriel Knight' and will always be proud of it. Despite the fact that I've done many other things, it seems to be the one thing that people remember. I hope 'Gray Matter' is as memorable.

The one thing that makes writing a better pastime than reading is that you can make things turn out the way you want in the end!

The problem with books, now that I've written one, is that the idea of adaptation is so much easier than sitting down to write something new.

Should you create a protagonist based directly on yourself? The problem with this - and it is a very large problem - is that almost no one can view himself objectively on the page. As the writer, you're too close to your own complicated makeup.

The problem with being a writer is that some readers tend to think that anything that comes out of a character's mouth is you talking.