Quotes About Authorship

Certainly a decade and a half out in the real world, bashing my head against things, probably made me into a more textured writer. It gives you something to write about.

It is a challenge to write in the real world once you've had the advantage of being able to create your own world.

In writing, I want to be remembered for telling good stories in beautiful and powerful language, using the poetry of words to reflect the thematic concerns of compelling stories.

I just don't see myself as a travel writer. I can't. I don't.

In eleven or twelve years of writing, Mike, I can lay claim to at least this: I have never written beneath myself. I have never written anything that I didn't want my name attached to. I have probed deeper in some scripts and I've been more successful in some than others. But all of them that have been on, you know, I'll take my lick. They're mine and that's the way I wanted them.

When I started writing full time I had not long stopped being a teacher and when at last I had a full day to write, I would put music on and wonder to myself - am I allowed to do this? Then I thought: 'I am control of this and no one is telling me what I can do.'

Why do we write? "To make suffering endurable To make evil intelligible To make justice desirable and . . . to make love possible

Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: "That's not writing, it's typing.

But how can one write a book with any integrity," he wonders, "if there is no assurance of the few years time any good book takes?

I've only been to jail a few times, but in several different countries, at that. No, I've only been to jail a few times. But I still claim the ability to write a "serious" novel.

Even today, authors who claim correctly, as Patrick Buchanan does in his book Churchill, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, that both World War I and World War II were "unnecessary wars" are shunned and ridiculed. Such a suggestion is so at odds with how history is taught in most US schools that many people are unwilling to even consider arguments backing Buchanan's conclusion.

The book of Genesis was written by Moses between 1445 and 1405 BC and is foundational to a proper understanding of the rest of the Bible.

If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.

Make them do as you want them to, she said. I can't, mourned Anne. Averil is such an unmanageable heroine. She will do and say things I never meant her to. Then that spoils everything that went before and I have to write it all over again.

I love weaving a story and spinning it around with my pen.

The man, the writer, the instrument of the creation will die, but his creation does not die.

But in the bare practical outlines, we are two writers, sitting at our desks, with starlings on our shoulders

a feud over who was to own the poet: in the first instance, who was to have the right to publish her works; in the second, whose legend would imprint itself on the public mind.

is only one thing more mortifying than having an exclamation mark removed by an editor: an exclamation mark added in.

I have been told that the dying words of one famous 20th-century writer were, "I should have used fewer semicolons

It's not my brain that's writing the book, it's these hands of mine.

If I never had another book published, and it was very clear to me that this was a real possibility, I still had to go on writing. I'm glad I made this decision in a moment of failure. It's easy to say you're a writer when things are going well. When the decision is made in the abyss, the in is quite clear that it is not one's own decision at all.

One of the most helpful tools a writer has is his journals. Whenever someone asks how to become an author, I suggest keeping a journal.

We, and I think I'm speaking for many writers, don't know what it is that sometimes comes to make our books alive. All we can do is write dutifully and day after day, every day, giving our work the very best of what we are capable. I don't that we can consciously put the magic in; it doesn't work that way. When the magic comes, it's a gift.