17 Authors Being Honest

Writers Write is a comprehensive resource for writers. In this post, we share a selection of our favourite quotes on authors being honest.

Here are 17 quotations from authors who are commenting honestly on their writing.

17 Authors Being Honest

1. I am the literary equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries. ~Stephen King
2. I’m the kind of writer that people think other people are reading. ~V.S. Naipaul
3. I can’t change overnight into a serious literary author. You can’t compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not. ~John Grisham
4. I don’t know why I started writing. I don’t know why anybody does it. Maybe they’re bored, or failures at something else. ~Cormac McCarthy
5. A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. But it burns with a high flame. ~Ray Bradbury
6. I fell into writing, I suppose, being one of those awful children who wrote verses. I went to a convent in New York—the Blessed Sacrament… I was fired from there, finally, for a lot of things, among them my insistence that the Immaculate Conception was spontaneous combustion. ~Dorothy Parker
7. I have forgotten my rave reviews and memorised my vicious ones – like most writers. ~Erica Jong
8. I never wrote so much as a line worth a nickel when I was under the influence of alcohol. ~Raymond Carver
9. Why would I care what other people are thinking? I don’t care what an audience thinks of me. ~Bret Easton Ellis
10. I’m pleased to have outsold great writers. But I’m not insane – I realise I am a writer people buy to take on vacation. ~Maeve Binchy
11. I’m slightly mercenary: I write for the money. ~Frederick Forsyth
12. If I could read while I was driving, showering, socialising or sleeping, I would do it. ~Elizabeth Gilbert
13. If I write a new play, my point of view may be profoundly modified. I may be obliged to contradict myself and I may no longer know whether I still think what I think. ~Eugene Ionesco
14. It was then that I saw the business of writing for what it truly was and is to me. It is your penance for not being lucky. It is an attempt to reach others and to make them love you. It is your instinctive protest, when you find you have no voice at the world’s tribunals, and that no one will speak for you. ~Anita Brookner
15. Lolita is famous, not I. I am an obscure, doubly obscure, novelist with an unpronounceable name. ~Vladimir Nabokov
16. The idea of writer as sage is pretty much dead today. I would certainly feel very uncomfortable in the role. ~J. M. Coetzee
17. The literary interview won’t tell you what a writer is like. Far more compellingly to some, it will tell you what a writer is like to interview. ~Martin Amis

by Amanda Patterson

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