Authorial Autonomy Quotes

I don't want the books to become PR exercises for the police; I want to have the freedom to write about cops who cross the line: bad cops.

So long as you write what you wish to write, that is all that matters; and whether it matters for ages or only for hours, nobody can say. But to sacrifice a hair of the head of your vision, a shade of its colour, in deference to some Headmaster with a silver pot in his hand or to some professor with a measuring-rod up his sleeve, is the most abject treachery, and the sacrifice of wealth and chastity which used to be said to be the greatest of human disasters, a mere flea-bite in comparison.

There’s no grand plan. All I know is that I write the books I want to write. All that other stuff is meaningless to me.

I'm a writer, not a genre.

Every writer has his own voice. Other than that I'm always trying to do change-ups and publishers haven't always been happy about that.

I have to write the story I want to write. I never wrote them with a focus group of 8-year-olds in mind. I have to continue telling the story the way I want to tell it.

I'm not a character in any of my books.

The good thing about being a writer is that you don't need anything except for a laptop. You can really do your own work and if you're not manically compelled to write all the time before you do it professionally, it's probably not a business for you anyway.

A good writer preserves an air of freedom in his prose, so that the reader won't know how a story will end - even if he's reading a history book.

The only way to write is well and how you do it is your own damn business.

To contest an author's right to create a poetic or realistic work is to want to force him to change his temperament, challenge his originality, refuse to allow him to use the eye and the intelligence nature has given him.

As a writer no one's gonna tell me how to write, I'm gonna write the way I wanna write!

Despite the fact that I had a writing background, they didn't want to accept whatever ideas I had as a writer.

I never want to feel constrained by writing a novel for a specific audience.

The thing that made me turn more towards writing was realizing how hard it was going to be to get a singular vision on film and how much more control I would have if I were writing novels.

I always figure there are novels and short stories, and in those, I'm God. No one tells me what to do. I don't have to lose a page, or cut anything, it's just mine. Then there are other things where you're up against realities.

And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?

Other people have hang-ups about what's literary or genre or whatever, and that's sort of not my problem. You're supposed to write what you have to write, and you're supposed to keep moving.

It's OK just to be a writer, who writes about the society in which he lives and the issues that most important. Now how can that not be a writer, it always was. It's just recently that writers have been reduced to these playthings of the market.

I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.

So okay - there you are in your room with the shade down and the door shut and the plug pulled out of the base of the telephone. You've blown up your TV and committed yourself to a thousand words a day, come hell or high water. Now comes the big question: What are you going to write about? And the equally big answer: Anything you damn well want.

My generation of young female writers discovered that we could dictate the form and content of our own fiction.

I studied English Literature. I wasn’t a very good student, but one thing I did get from it, while I was making films at the same time with the college film society, was that I started thinking about the narrative freedoms that authors had enjoyed for centuries and it seemed to me that filmmakers should enjoy those freedoms as well.

When I write a novel, every word is mine. I welcome suggestions from my editor, but in the end, I make all the final decisions.

I have Graham Greene's telephone number, but I wouldn't dream of using it. I don't seek out writers because we all want to be alone.