Author's Life Quotes

Being an author is fun. It's a great job, because I can stay up as late as I want, and if I feel like taking the day off, I do it. Plus, I get to make up silly stories and draw pictures all day.

Writing a novel is not method acting and I find it easy to step out of it at cocktail hour.

When I'm working on a novel, I work 70-hour weeks.

When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.

I guess there's a sort of cycle with writing books. There's all the researching and then the imagining and writing - which is the real job - and then there's always a period when the book comes out and you have to lift your head and venture out.

I started writing when I was twenty, and my first book came out seventeen years later.

I remember the days of sitting at book signings, playing with my pen when no one would come, and still I even then thought I was living the dream, because I had a book out.

The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.

It is commonly supposed that the uniformity of a studious life affords no matter for narration: but the truth is, that of the most studious life a great part passes without study. An author partakes of the common condition of humanity; he is born and married like another man; he has hopes and fears, expectations and disappointments, griefs and joys, and friends and enemies, like a courtier or a statesman; nor can I conceive why his affairs shuld not excite curiosity as much as the whisper of a drawing-room, or the factions of a camp.

I was writing 'He Who Shapes' when I was working for the Social Security Administration in Baltimore.

A novelist has two lives-- a reading and writing life, and a lived life. he or she cannot be understood at all apart from this.

The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.

I write every day. I'm always in the process of writing my last book, until the next one.

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.

I get over a hundred letters a day from all over the world, from children and parents, and it's a wonder I ever have time to write books, let alone speak!

Overall, one of the things that excites me most about self-publishing is that the highest-value use of my time in promoting the books will be found in writing more of them.

For a lot of people, becoming an author is a change in occupation... they are coming from something that totally has nothing to do with this. If they are expecting to come into a room full of people praising them, then they are in the wrong place.

In terms of people who want to be writers, I wish more people knew how much work it was.

I always start a book for money. If you're married five times you have to.

I like writing. I get cranky when I can't. Yes, I write books back to back, and I work very hard on them.

Becoming a mother cannot help but change things. An author's life is reflected in their writing, whether they want it to be or not, and parenthood is one of the biggest life changes there is.

In her excellent, entirely readable Richard Wright, Hazel Rowley accomplishes what [previous biographer] Michel Fabre would have liked to do with once-guarded letters, aging witnesses, previously unidentified girlfriends. . . . Mostly, Rowley concentrates on telling Wright's very powerful story.

In 2011, I announced that I was going to retire, and my agent panicked. So she says: No, no, no. You have to write a book with your husband.

Just like all my novels, 'Illusion' is a good way to observe where Frank Peretti was in his life when he wrote it.

So much of writing isn't the fun parts like we get to discuss. It is sitting there putting the words down.