authorship quotes

I have tried for much of my life to write as if I was composing my sentences to be read posthumously.

I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill.

When you pick up a book, everyone knows it’s imaginary. You don’t have to pretend it’s not a book. We don’t have to pretend that people don’t write books. That omniscient third-person narration isn’t the only way to do it. Once you’re writing in the first person, then the narrator is a writer.

I always tell audiences when I talk about writing: Writing isn’t something I do; writing is something that I am. I am writing – it’s just an expression of me.

In all seriousness, people think that it’s the ideas that are important. Well, everyone has ideas, all the time. I tend to write mine down and remember them, but at some point you have to apply the bum to the seat and knock out about sixty five thousand words – that’s how long a novel is.

The ear is the only true writer and the only true reader.

Each book I’ve done somehow finds its own unique form, a specific way it has to be written, and once I find it, I stick with it.

I’ve still not written as well as I want to. I want to write so that the reader in Des Moines, Iowa, in Kowloon, China, in Cape Town, South Africa, can say, ‚You know, that’s the truth. I wasn’t there, and I wasn’t a six-foot black girl, but that’s the truth.‘

Irregularity and want of method are only supportable in men of great learning or genius, who are often too full to be exact, and therefore they choose to throw down their pearls in heaps before the reader, rather than be at the pains of stringing them.

If a man writes a book, let him set down only what he knows. I have guesses enough of my own.

Once I’ve written something it does tend to run away from me. I don’t seem to have any part of it – it’s no longer my piece of writing.

I would venture to guess that Anon, who wrote so many poems without signing them, was often a woman.

Why there is one body in our System qualified to give light and heat to all the rest, I know no reason but because the Author of the System thought it convenient; and why there is but one body of this kind, I know no reason, but because one was sufficient to warm and enlighten all the rest.

A serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.

I write for no other purpose than to add to the beauty that now belongs to me. I write a book for no other reason than to add three or four hundred acres to my magnificent estate.

A man’s got to take a lot of punishment to write a really funny book.

No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.

After you finish a book, you know, you’re dead. But no one knows you’re dead. All they see is the irresponsibility that comes in after the terrible responsibility of writing.

I want to be an honest man and a good writer.

I was saving the name of ‚Geisel‘ for the Great American Novel.

I notice that my characters go out to dinner and have fun and take these great trips, but I spend so much time on their lives, I don’t have much of a personal life of my own. I have to sort of remember to fill out that little notebook on me.

The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.

I remember very little about writing the first series of ‚Hitchhiker’s.‘ It’s almost as if someone else wrote it.

No one sells a song better than the person that wrote it.

I don’t think about who the audience is for my books.

I can’t consciously explain how people feel after reading my books. All is too personal.

Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good.

The author of the Iliad is either Homer or, if not Homer, somebody else of the same name.

I don’t like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can’t do it.

When I write, I try to become different characters.

For a long time now I have tried simply to write the best I can. Sometimes I have good luck and write better than I can.

If the writing is honest it cannot be separated from the man who wrote it.

There’s nothing worse than sitting down to write a novel and saying, ‚Well, okay, I’m going to do something of high artistic worth.‘

I’ve been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don’t need to write a book for adults.