Money is an unavoidable consequence, but it isn’t the reason I write; if it was, I wouldn’t have written any of the YA books, because advances in that field are small compared to what I’d got now for an ‚adult‘ DW.
Terry PratchettA fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.
Haruki MurakamiThere is a soak-the-rich attitude in the air, a feeling that if you have a lot of money you must have got it by some ghastly means. I can quite happily say there was never any family money. All the money we got was mine, just from writing books.
Terry PratchettA critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.
Oscar Wilde‚Royal Beatings‘ was my first story, and it was published in 1977. But I sent all my early stories to ‚The New Yorker‘ in the 1950s, and then I stopped sending for a long time and sent only to magazines in Canada. ‚The New Yorker‘ sent me nice notes, though – penciled, informal messages. They never signed them. They weren’t terribly encouraging.
Alice MunroSomeone told me something that stuck with me: ‚You have to envision your life, and then go backwards.‘ I’ve been living by that motto for a while, so I see where I need to be. Now I’m just backtracking and trying to get back up there.
Bruno MarsPractically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.
Groucho MarxIsn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?
Albert EinsteinThe best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.
Friedrich NietzscheI will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.
J. K. RowlingI’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.
Margaret AtwoodWhen a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.
PlatoI started writing at the kitchen table after midnight. It took ten months to finish that first book; I sent it to a publisher and I got some kind of prize, so it was like a dream – I was surprised to find it happening.
Haruki MurakamiI’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.
Maya AngelouWhatever the reviewers feel about ‚The Casual Vacancy‘, it is what I wanted it to be, and you can’t say fairer than that as a writer.
J. K. RowlingAs I approached my 95th birthday, I was burdened to write a book that addressed the epidemic of ‚easy believism.‘ There is a mindset today that if people believe in God and do good works, they are going to Heaven.
Billy GrahamYou know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.
Jeff BezosI wanted to write a book that talked about the emotions of children, which is the rainbow. We all have moods. We talk about being blue when we’re sad, and being yellow when we’re cowards, and when we’re mad, we’re red.
Dolly PartonI’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.
Ernest HemingwayA creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheOnce you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.
Margaret AtwoodNo, it’s not a very good story – its author was too busy listening to other voices to listen as closely as he should have to the one coming from inside.
Stephen KingAn author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.
Benjamin DisraeliRead with care, George Orwell’s diaries, from the years 1931 to 1949, can greatly enrich our understanding of how Orwell transmuted the raw material of everyday experience into some of his best-known novels and polemics.
Christopher HitchensWhen we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.
Blaise PascalI like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
Terry PratchettI start each book when it’s ready and never before.
Alice WalkerIf you love something – and there are things that I love – you do want more and more and more of it, but that’s not the way to produce good work. So as an author, I need to write what I need to write.
J. K. RowlingI write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.
Terry PratchettWhile working on my first five books, I kept wishing I was writing a novel. I thought until you wrote a novel, you weren’t taken seriously as a writer. It used to trouble me a lot, but nothing troubles me now, and besides, there has been a change. I think short stories are taken more seriously now than they were.
Alice MunroMake measurable progress in reasonable time.
Jim RohnMy own books drive themselves. I know roughly where a book is going to end, but essentially the story develops under my fingers. It’s just a matter of joining the dots.
Terry PratchettWhen an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus SenecaThe moment I said I’d finished a book, I knew what would happen. There would be a bidding war, and I would end up with someone who’d got the fattest wallet, who had bought it because I’d written Harry Potter. That would have been why.
J. K. RowlingI have finally decided to write my book on the spiritual life. I mean to put down as simply as possible the sort of ascetical or mystical teaching that I have been living and preaching so long. I call it ‚Le Milieu Divin,‘ but I am being careful to include nothing esoteric and the minimum of explicit philosophy.
Pierre Teilhard de ChardinAn author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
F. Scott FitzgeraldI don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.
Haruki MurakamiI never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.
Paul AusterDickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.
Terry PratchettA writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.
Ernest HemingwayHistorian: an unsuccessful novelist.
H. L. MenckenI’m not intelligent. I’m not arrogant. I’m just like the people who read my books. I used to have a jazz club, and I made the cocktails and I made the sandwiches. I didn’t want to become a writer – it just happened.
Haruki MurakamiJane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.
J. K. RowlingIt took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.
Paulo CoelhoMy biographers… would like to have my time at the court almost complete before they finish the book. We decided… to flip the order.
Ruth Bader GinsburgOf course, there are those critics – New York critics as a rule – who say, ‚Well, Maya Angelou has a new book out and of course it’s good but then she’s a natural writer.‘ Those are the ones I want to grab by the throat and wrestle to the floor because it takes me forever to get it to sing. I work at the language.
Maya AngelouI’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.
David BowieMost people dream a dream when they are asleep. But to be a writer, you have to dream while you are awake, intentionally. So I get up early in the morning, 4 o’clock, and I sit at my desk and what I do is just dream. After three or four hours, that’s enough. In the afternoon, I run. The next day, the dream will continue.
Haruki MurakamiFor me, writing a novel is like having a dream. Writing a novel lets me intentionally dream while I’m still awake. I can continue yesterday’s dream today, something you can’t normally do in everyday life.
Haruki MurakamiIf you feel that there’s the author and then the character, then the book is not working. People have a habit of identifying the author with the narrator, and you can’t, obviously, be all of the narrators in all of your books, or else you’d be a very strange person indeed.
Margaret AtwoodGeorge Orwell is half journalist, half fiction writer. I’m 100 percent fiction writer… I don’t want to write messages. I want to write good stories. I think of myself as a political person, but I don’t state my political messages to anybody.
Haruki MurakamiEvery author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheI have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.
George W. BushI’m a pretty decent writer. It comes easy to me. I don’t agonize over sentences. I write like I talk. I try to make them good books.
Anthony BourdainIn every author let us distinguish the man from his works.
VoltaireA bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.
Aldous HuxleyI hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.
Harper LeeWhen I write a book, I write a book for myself; the reaction is up to the reader. It’s not my business whether people like or dislike it.
Paulo Coelho‚The Lion‘ all began with a picture of a faun carrying an umbrella and parcels in a snowy wood. This picture had been in my mind since I was about sixteen. Then one day, when I was about forty, I said to myself, ‚Let’s try to make a story about it.‘
C. S. LewisThe difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by five hundred readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the five hundred, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
Henry Adams