Quotes about Authorship

People would much rather argue their own visions and conceptions about a book than engage in a dialogue with the author, because the author could always trump you with, 'I wrote it.'

I have always wanted to write a novel, and I tried many times but could never find the right story. One day, I was walking on the beach, and the idea for 'Groundswell' hit me. I went into the house and started writing and never stopped.

God creates history, while people create an epic or a drama, drawn either from God's history or from unreality and pure fiction.

Never index your own book.

All writing comes by the grace of God.

I cannot marry the facts of William Shakespeare to his verse: Other men had led lives in some sort of keeping with their thought, but this man is in wide contrast.

Better that the book should be not quite so good, and the writer better, and not himself a ridiculous contrast to all he has written.

Our speculations about Shakespeare are almost as multifarious and foolish as our speculations about the maker of the universe, and, like those, are frequently concerned to establish that his works were not made by him but by another person of the same name.

This, she felt, was her fault. Her idea in the first place. Her house. Her honeymoon. Her — and this was the incalculable factor in the thing — her husband. (A repressive word, that, when you came to think of it, compounded of a grumble and a thump.) The

I've written six novels and four pieces of nonfiction, so I don't really have a genre these days.

It has been said that to write is to live forever. The man who said that is dead.

You must not suppose, because I am a man of letters, that I never tried to earn an honest living.