#authors

We do not wait for inspiration. We work because we've jolly well got to. But when all is said and done, we toil at this particular job because it's turned out to be our particular job, and in a weird sort of way I suppose we may be said to like it. ↗

— Ngaio Marsh

#writing #inspirational

They say your life is either an example or a warning. However, an inspirational writer's life tends to be both. Without our own mistakes, our books would never shed tears or shout Hallelujah. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#inspirational-authors #writers #inspirational

The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych." [Colm Tóibín, Novelist – Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013] ↗

— Colm Tóibín

#conceit #critique #diptychs #grandeur #novelists

If you fall in love with a character, then you are actually falling in love with the author that wrote the character. Therefore, you could conclude that if you are said author, you are in love with yourself. ↗

— Heather Dowell

#humorous-quotations #in-love #love

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot. BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR per G.G., CHIEF OF ORDNANCE ↗

— Mark Twain

#preface #reading #warning #motivational

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#disappointment #epigrams #fandom #on-writing #similes

The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own. ↗

— Benjamin Disraeli

#authority

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ↗

— Logan Pearsall Smith

#authority

No book worth its salt is meant to put you to sleep, it's meant to make you jump out of your bed in your underwear and run and beat the author's brains out. ↗

— Bohumil Hrabal

#books #brains #sleep #underwear #authority

Writing is finally about one thing: going into a room alone and doing it. Putting words on paper that have never been there in quite that way before. And although you are physically by yourself, the haunting Demon never leaves you, that Demon being the knowledge of your own terrible limitations, your hopeless inadequacy, the impossibility of ever getting it right. No matter how diamond-bright your ideas are dancing in your brain, on paper they are earthbound. ↗

— William Goldman

#doubts #self-doubt #writing #doubt