Quotes About Ghostwriting

The hardest part of ghost writing other people's stories is capturing their voices so that it isn't you talking, it's them.

It implies a slight failure as a writer that you are reduced to being a ghostwriter for the money.

Let me get something straight: I have no problem with ghostwriting as a thing unto itself. What bothers me is the way it's shrouded in secrecy, ignored to the point of straight-up lying. Why not be honest?

I worked in the book publishing business for nearly two decades before I turned my attention to writing, first with a couple ghostwriting projects, plus a crappy novel that absolutely no one wanted to publish. Then I moved to Luxembourg for my wife's job and found the inspiration for 'The Expats.'

Don't see the point in reading ghost-written autobiographies, even though some of these published lives may fascinate me. The 'ghost' is always present, manipulating an interview into first-person singular text, and it feels like I'm reading a lie.

As a ghost writer, many words I have written have been for someone else.

Nothing to say. I used to be a ghostwriter for a publisher.' 'Medieval stuff?' 'Eighty-page love stories. You have this guy, untrustworthy but good in bed, and this girl, radiant but innocent. In the end they fall madly in love and it's incredibly boring. The story doesn't say when they split up.' 'Of course not,' said Mathias

I realize that 'Postcards' was like input, and 'Ghostwriting' was output. I had all these frustrations and feelings before I did those two projects. 'Postcards' was something that brought new life and creative inspiration into the record, while 'Ghostwriting' was relieving myself.

I have a hardcore attitude: a "self-published, ghost-written book" is wrong because the concept behind self publishing is that you have knowledge or emotions that you want to express. When people read a book—particularly a self-published one—they have the right to expect that it's the person's writing, not cleaned-up dictation or slapping a name on a book that someone else wrote.

I write detective novels when I'm not ghostwriting. I'd never gotten any of them published, and that, of course, was the main thing I didn't want to think about. But writing them is what keeps me going.

I was writing at a really young age, but it took me a long time to be brave enough to become a published writer, or to try to become a published writer. It's a very public way to fail. And I was kind of scared, so I started out as a ghost writer, and I wrote for other series, like Disney 'Aladdin' and 'Sweet Valley' and books like that.

The trouble with being a ghostwriter or artist is that you must remain rather anonymously without credit. If one wants the credit, one has to cease being a ghost and become a leader or innovator.

The trouble with ghostwriting is that it raises the issue of whether the president is in a state of diminished responsibility for what he says. Does he actually grasp the implications of the words he speaks?

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

Back in the olden days when we were rubbing sticks together, everybody wanted to have a comic strip, to live in Westport Connecticut, to have a Jaguar and to have a wife and two and a half kids and to have a girl in town in their studio in Manhattan that they'd romance, and then they'd have people ghost their strip. It was like this big dream.

I've tried in the past to blog about ghostwriting and have failed. I have a lot of opinions on the whole issue, and I'm constantly censoring myself to make sure I don't just sound like a bitter writer.