Quotes About Authorship

This book that defied the categories has now endured for more than half a century, finding new readers in each generation. What is its secret? And what kind of person could produce such a book? Madeleine, c. 1920

I started to write when I was five, and as I look back on fifty years of this work, I am forced to see that my own continuing development involves pain. It is pain and weakness and constant failures which keep me from pride and help me to grow.

I heard a famous author say once that the hardest part of writing a book was making yourself sit down at the typewriter. I know what he meant. Unless a writer works constantly to improve and refine the tools of his trade they will be useless instruments if and when the moment of inspiration, of revelation, does come. This is the moment when a writer is spoken through, the moment that a writer must accept with gratitude and humility, and then attempt, as best he can, to communicate to others.

No complete son of a bitch ever wrote a good sentence.

Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book.

Words belong to the person who wrote them

There is a place for hyperbole and I believe it's the back jacket of books

You write one book and you're ready for fame and fortune. I don't know that people are spending the time and attention on learning how to write-which takes years. Everybody sees the success stories.

Don't let anyone tell your story. Pick up a pen and write your own.

You are the author of your success. Every day, you write another page to the chapter of success for you life. Practice at becoming an excellent person, at what you want to be best at.

There were creative-writin g teachers long before there were creative-writin g courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors.

If you steal from one book you are condemned as a plagiarist, but if you steal from ten books you are considered a scholar, and if you steal from thirty or forty books, a distinguished scholar.') On

Without a wound, there is no author

I thought I was clever enough to write as well as these people and I didn't realize that there is something called originality and your own voice.

It doesn't matter whether one is for or against—the writing it is all that counts.

I'm not going to let the book go for a song—and I'm not going to let Kahane get the idea that he's doing me a favor by publishing it.

Had a cordial note from Dos Passos, in Key West, Fla., saying he would be delighted to receive a copy—but I'm not sending him one, for the reason given.)

Can a man read a book written by a woman in which she, the author, has a direct relationship to experience, ideas, literature, life, including fucking, without mediation-such that what she says and how she says it are not determined by boundaries men have set for her?

What does one ever ask an author except: "How?" And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: "Beats me!

What does one ever ask an author except: How? And the answer, as Less well knows, is obvious: Beats me!

Every book it's the hardest part-finding the way in, finding the voice to tell the story. H

I don't understand how anyone can write if they don't use public transport. I earwig all the time.

You wrote the scary letters!

No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.