authors

There is nothing harder to estimate than a writer's time, nothing harder to keep track of. There are moments__oments of sustained creation__hen his time is fairly valuable; and there are hours and hours when a writer's time isn't worth the paper he is not writing anything on.

... And the only way to find that honesty is to not overthink it.For your writing to come alive--to be multi-dimensional--you must barter away some control.

All Jane Austen novels have a common storyline: an attractive and virtuous young woman surmounts difficulties to achieve marriage to the man of her choice. This is the age-long convention of the romantic novel, but with Jane Austen, what we have is Mills & Boon written by a genius.

I don't know much about creative writing programs. But they're not telling the truth if they don't teach, one, that writing is hard work, and, two, that you have to give up a great deal of life, your personal life, to be a writer.

Writing romantic fiction is the second chance that loved ones denied us.

The standard personality type for a writer is a shy megalomaniac.

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It'll be a change," says Marcus. "Something different.""Not a mystery."Marcus laughs. "No. Not a mystery. Just a nice safe history."Ah, my darling. But there is no such thing.

The finder of his theme will be at no loss for words.

One kind of good book should leave you asking: how did the author know that about me?

Between the lines of every book the writer reveals their own secrets.

I would not employ an author to referee a Ping-Pong match. By their very nature they are biased and bloody-minded. Better put a fox in a henhouse than to ask an author to judge his peers. (in a letter to the Governor General about the GA's Literary Awards & his issue--among others--with the judging system, 1981)

I write to believe in goodness.

Writer's block' is just a fancy way of saying 'I don't feel like doing any work today.

My Aunt Dahlia, who runs a woman's paper called Milady's Boudoir, had recently backed me into a corner and made me promise to write her a few words for her "Husbands and Brothers" page on "What the Well-Dressed Man is Wearing". I believe in encouraging aunts, when deserving; and, as there are many worse eggs than her knocking about the metrop, I had consented blithely. But I give you my honest word that if I had had the foggiest notion of what I was letting myself in for, not even a nephew's devotion would have kept me from giving her the raspberry. A deuce of a job it had been, taxing the physique to the utmost. I don't wonder now that all these author blokes have bald heads and faces like birds who have suffered.

I have a pesky little critic in the back of my mind. He's a permanent fixture and passes judgment on everything I write.In order to placate him, especially when I'm endeavoring to write anything as ambitious as a novel, I have to constantly mutter, 'I'm not writing a masterpiece, I'm not writing a masterpiece.'This mantra lulls him into a kind of stupor so that he pays no attention to what I'm doing, because after all, I'm not claiming it's any good. Slowly, and secretly, one page at a time, I write my story.I know I've succeeded when he grudgingly admits, 'That's pretty good.' And if I'm lucky, every once in a while, I blow him away.

It had been startling and disappointing to me to find out that story books had been written by people, that books were not natural wonders, coming up of themselves like grass.

The writer has little control over personal temperament, none over historical moment, and is only partly in charge of his or her own aesthetic.