Quotes About Authorship

I wrote to explain my own life to myself, stories are the vessels I use to interpret the world to myself.

Books, I don't know what you see in them. I can understand a person reading them, but I can't for the life of me see why people have to write them.

I turn sentences around. That's my life. I write a sentence and then I turn it around. Then I look at it and turn it around again.

I've been writing every day of my life for 65 years.

I am a great foe of favoritism in public life, in private life, and even in the delicate relationship of an author to his works.

I've spent my life alone in a room with a typewriter.

It's just a freak of fate that I'm paid to write, not paying to print my own books - but I'd be doing it anyway: it's my life.

My life as a writer consists of 1/8 talent and 7/8 discipline.

Writing fulfils an insatiable drive. Finishing the story satisfies my thirst. But I must keep drinking until the story quenches a buyer.

I feel in some ways I've had a difficult life. And it makes me the kind of writer I am, in what I value, what I respect, what I hold dear.

When you ask, did writing change my life? It totally changed my life. It gave me my life.

The writer's life is a life of revisions.

As a writer, I am constantly aware that I take my life in my hands with everything I do and say. It's just a fact of life. For me it always has been.

Kerouac and I are not real at all. The only thing about a writer is that he has written, and not his so-called life. 'And we (will) all die and the stars will go out, one after another.

Writers are the custodians of memory, and that's what this chapter is about: how to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.

My kind publishers, Toby Mundy and Margaret Stead of Atlantic Books, have commissioned me to write the life of Queen Victoria.

...she felt about reading what some writers felt about writing: that it was impossible not to do it and that at this late stage of her life she had been chosen to read as others were chosen to write.

I've been writing most of my life; it's just something I do.

As a writer, you live in such isolation. It's hard to imagine your book has a life beyond you.

I was a businessman for 16 years of my life, so when I started writing, I wanted to keep my literary identity separate.

I've been writing all my life. Even though I didn't have sort of careerist aspirations as a writer, it was very much my identity.

The cool thing about having a book is that it takes on its own life. Once it's in the world, you can't follow it. You'd have to have a pretty fantastic surveillance system to track its migration.

Life is nearly over with me. I have taken no pains about my style of writing.

I know many writers who first dictate passages, then polish what they have dictated. I speak, then I polish - occasionally I do windows.