author quotes

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don’t know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

I am a dangerous man when turned loose with a typewriter.

I hoped to be able to write a novel which would enable me to live on it while I wrote the next.

‚For Whom the Bell Tolls‘ was a problem which I carried on each day. I knew what was going to happen in principle. But I invented what happened each day I wrote.

‚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.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

If 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.

I loved writing for kids, I loved talking to children about what I’d written, I don’t want to leave that behind.

While 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.

I’ve tried to reduce profanity but I reduced so much profanity when writing the book that I’m afraid not much could come out. Perhaps we will have to consider it simply as a profane book and hope that the next book will be less profane or perhaps more sacred.

When I am working on a book or a story, I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you, and it is cool or cold, and you come to your work and warm as you write.

When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.

There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.

‚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.‘

It 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.

I am not a self-help writer. I am a self-problem writer. When people read my books, I provoke some things. I cannot justify my work. I do my work; it is up to them to classify it, to judge.

Whatever 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.

The 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.

When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.

Mr. Henry James writes fiction as if it were a painful duty.

When 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.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.

A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author’s soul.

Jane Austen is the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire.

People want to know why I do this, why I write such gross stuff. I like to tell them I have the heart of a small boy… and I keep it in a jar on my desk.

I’m not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

A writer of fiction is really… a congenital liar who invents from his own knowledge or that of other men.

No, 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.

The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.

Over the years, people I’ve met have often asked me what I’m working on, and I’ve usually replied that the main thing was a book about Dresden.

If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!

I cannot claim to have had a hard time publishing.

I start each book when it’s ready and never before.

Isn’t it strange that I who have written only unpopular books should be such a popular fellow?