author quotes

I’m not a writer who teaches. I’m a teacher who writes.

Read 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.

I know some people might think it odd – unworthy even – for me to have written a cookbook, but I make no apologies. The U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins thought I had demeaned myself by writing poetry for Hallmark Cards, but I am the people’s poet so I write for the people.

I don’t control my writing – it controls me.

The thing is, ‚Discworld‘ had been going on for a very long time, and I’ve written children’s books as well. Usually when people have a really big series they franchise it, which I thought is a bit of a no-no, so I thought what I’d do is I’d franchise it to myself.

There 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.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

I’ve had all six of my books reach the New York Times bestseller list, which is especially rewarding seeing as I flunked out of high school twice because I couldn’t write. It just goes to show you that we learn from our mistakes.

I never experiment with anything in my books. Experimentation means you don’t know what you’re doing.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can’t. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

My 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.

I haven’t read Horowitz. I didn’t used to read him when he was a Stalinist, and I don’t read him today.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

Well I think any author or musician is anxious to have legitimate sales of their products, partly so they’re rewarded for their success, partly so they can go on and do new things.

Of 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.

Dickens, as you know, never got round to starting his home page.

No one’s policing their own minds more than an author. You spend a lot of time in your own head analysing what you think about things, and a philosophy comes.

I have written a book. This will come as quite a shock to some. They didn’t think I could read, much less write.

An author writes a book, and that’s the book at that point. And if the author writes the book again, then somehow something has gone wrong, if you see what I mean.

There is no author whose books I look forward to more than Vaclav Smil.

I didn’t want to be a writer, but I became one. And now I have many readers, in many countries. I think that’s a miracle. So I think I have to be humble regarding this ability. I’m proud of it and I enjoy it, and it is strange to say it this way, but I respect it.

I am 55 years old now. It takes three years to write one book. I don’t know how many books I will be able to write before I die. It is like a countdown. So with each book I am praying – please let me live until I am finished.

Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book, and does.

When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.

I don’t know how many good books I still have in me; I hope there are another four or five.

George 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.

Many people tell me that they don ‚t know what to feel when they finish one of my books because the story was dark, or complicated, or strange. But while they were reading it, they were inside my world and they were happy. That’s good.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, ‚Why don’t you write your autobiography?‘

Dickens is one of those authors who are well worth stealing.

An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.

It’s so tedious writing cookbooks or writing the recipes because I’ve never been much of a measurer. But to write a book, you have to measure everything.

There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.

I wasn’t a normal professor. I had worked in government. I hadn’t written nine zillion books. I was a hands-on professor.

I’m the only person you’ve ever met who has read Longfellow.

I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

I’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.

I’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.

I’ll tell you who I absolutely adore: Ian McEwan.

A creation of importance can only be produced when its author isolates himself, it is a child of solitude.

You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

I never liked Hans Christian Andersen because I knew he was always getting at me.

If 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.

Every author in some way portrays himself in his works, even if it be against his will.

The writer must earn money in order to be able to live and to write, but he must by no means live and write for the purpose of making money.

For 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.

Most 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.

I’ve just finished my 20th book this past year and I’m working on my 21st book about the Middle East right now that I’ll finish this year. And I get up early in the morning and when I get tired of the computer and tired of doing research, I walk 20 steps out to my woodshop and I either build furniture or paint paintings. I’m an artist too.

My favorite book is anything by Kurt Vonnegut – he’s my literary hero. I got to meet him several times, which was a great thrill for me. I don’t really remember what we talked about.

I 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.

When I was researching my book ‚The 33 Strategies of War‘, I studied Napoleon extensively and I found myself wanting to ask Napoleon questions about things he did, and if was I interpreting his actions correctly.

The 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.

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.

I have zero desire, just so you know, to be in the limelight. I don’t think it’s good for the country to have a former president criticize his successor. You’re not going to see me giving my opinions in the public arena, until I start selling my book. I’m going to emerge then submerge.

Historian: an unsuccessful novelist.

An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.

The best author will be the one who is ashamed to become a writer.

A fortunate author can write maybe twelve novels in his lifetime.

I’m writing a book. I’ve got the page numbers done.

When you write your first book aged 25 or so, you have 25 years of experience, albeit much of it juvenile experience. The second book comes after an extra year sitting in bookshops. Pretty soon, you begin to run on empty.