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Authorship Quotes
"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"
20
"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens."
18
"I didn't really escape that gravity until I moved 300 miles south to go to college at 18, where authorship no longer seemed something liable to induce vengeful punishment."
15
"The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more."
12
"A writer is congenitally unable to tell the truth and that is why we call what he writes fiction."
12
"We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship."
11
"Authorship of anything apart from God is nothing more than a tragedy in the making."
10
"Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts."
9
"An author in his book must be like God in the universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere."
8
"A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me."
8
"It was useless trying to explain to Cecila that poetry wasn't a commodity, that it could never be bought or sold, that it was, in fact, unteansferrable, remaining forever a part of the one who wrote it."
7
"If you think there is no time to write now, there would never be."
6
"We write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are."
5
"Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly."
5
"A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work."
4
"A writer always begins by being too complicated-he's playing at several games at once."
4
"I have a handful of prayers that I pray all the time... One is that God will put my books into the right hands at the right times. I've prayed this prayer thousands of times, and God has answered it in dramatic fashion countless times. The right book in the right hands at the right time can save a marriage, avert a mistake, demand a decision, plant a seed, conceive a dream, solve a problem, and prompt a prayer. That is why I write. And that's why, for me, a book sold is not a book sold; a book sold is a prayer answered. I don't know the name and situation of every reader, but God does, and that's all that matters."
2
"It will be sent that, although the writer's love is verily a jealous love, it is a jealousy for and not of his creatures. He will tolerate no interference either with them or between them and himself."
1
"The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to, surely one can only write the book that is there to be written."
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