Authorial Self Quotes

I don't know if I have a book in me, but I'm sure I have more essays.

I am a novelist through and through.

Do you think that Hemingway knew he was a writer at twenty years old? No, he did not. Or Fitzgerald, or Wolfe. This is a difficult concept to grasp. Hemingway didn't know he was Ernest Hemingway when he was a young man. Faulkner didn't know he was William Faulkner. But they had to take the first step. They had to call themselves writers. That is the first revolutionary act a writer has to make. It takes courage. But it's necessary

In 'A Boy's Own Story' and 'Jack Holmes and His Friend,' my idea was to take someone totally different from my real self and, at the same time, to assign to him my own life trajectory.

Over time, it's occurred to me that my protagonists all originate in some aspect of myself that I find myself questioning or feeling uncomfortable about.

I believe that there is much less difference between the author and his works than is currently supposed; it is usually in the physical appearance of the writer,--his manners, his mien, his exterior,--that he falls short of the ideal a reasonable man forms of him--rarely in his mind.

At the age of eight I became, in my own eyes at least, a writer.

I do consider myself a Norwegian writer, or a Scandinavian writer, as my family tree reaches into both Denmark and Sweden. I don't think about it, of course, when I am writing.

In many of my plays, there was a kind of autobiographical character in the form of a son or young man. The purpose of it, of course, was to write about myself. That character was always the least fully realized. Eighteen years later, you realize, That's what he was about.

I don't think there was a time I ever thought of myself as anything but a writer. I thought I was going to be the next Toni Morrison.

I don't remember a time when I didn't define myself as a writer.

Novels are a kind of experiment in selfhood, for the reader as well as for the author.

Every thought and word that a novelist thinks or writes is part of that castle constructed from sands on the beach of Me, including the turret or rampart or moat he may have thought or written on behalf of someone or something else.

That's the thing about writing for a lot of the villains is that, as a writer, you kind of have to put the best part of your own personality aside and instead focus on whatever little strange quirks you may have in your personality.

I've always thought a novelist only has one character, and that is himself or herself. In my case, me.

A lot of people have always asked, is Penn Cage me? And I say no. There's an early character in an earlier novel, 'Mortal Fear,' that's closer to me.

The nearest figure to myself would be Shakespeare.

There's this pet phrase about writing that is bandied around particularly in workshops about "finding your own voice as a poet", which I suppose means that you come out from under the direct influence of other poets and have perhaps found a way to combine those influences so that it appears to be your own voice. But I think you could also put it a different way. You, quote, find your voice, unquote, when you are able to invent this one character who resembles you, obviously, and probably is more like you than anyone else on earth, but is not the equivalent to you.