Ghostwriting Quotes

The trouble with being a ghostwriter or artist is that you must remain rather anonymously without credit. If one wants the credit, one has to cease being a ghost and become a leader or innovator.

While I write for myself, I also write for other artists too.

I learned a lot of things about literature talking to people at the publishing company. Did you know that about 90 percent of celebrity autobiographies are ghostwritten?

[Spiro] Agnew was a small-time pol who became the most blatant crook to sit one heartbeat away from the presidency. He was a demagogue ranting ghost-written bile that split Americans amid the war and fires of the '60s. But political peers, sensing in Agnew's tumble their own fragility, always treated Spiro as gently as a museum vase.

I do not like people writing songs and then other people singing them. A lot of people don't even sing their own songs anymore. It's like producers these days have ghost producers; 'I don't produce, but I am a producer.'

Today's public figures can no longer write their own speeches or books, and there is some evidence that they can't read them either.

The trouble with ghostwriting is that it raises the issue of whether the president is in a state of diminished responsibility for what he says. Does he actually grasp the implications of the words he speaks?

All of my books are about researching. I do all the research and I give it to a writer who can put it in the written word better than I could.

James Madison was the Speaker of the House. But he also wrote many speeches for George Washington. He even wrote some of Washington’s Messages to Congress. Then as the Speaker, he would write the reply to Washington’s message that he had written.

A lot of people don't know what I do. In the industry they take credit for work because to some degree it makes them feel worthy or greater. I am not a ghostwriter 'cause it is on the CD covers who wrote and did what but people don't care about anything they can't see. The work gets unnoticed and the credibility goes untouched.

There are major writers who have written books [based on my research]. If one looks carefully at the copyright page, you'll see my name. Writers of the stature of Mailer and even bigger. All over the world.

Other bands in Vegas hated us because we hadn't played shows and paid our dues. Publications called us out, saying we were just a put-together band, claiming we had ghostwriters. It made me so happy, the fact that everyone was hating on us so hard.

I always said if a man would have done half the records that I've done, we would know about it. But we don't know all the records I've done for other artists.

Book publishing would be so much easier without the authors.

So I had a ghostwriter, they call them, or somebody who is an experienced writer, to help. I've got the ideas in my head, it's getting them properly on paper.

I wrote four novels under the name Amy Silver. The first one was commissioned, and I was given basically the whole plot and the characters. They told me what to do, and I went straight away and did it. After that, I continued, and I was coming up with more my own ideas, although they did steer me.

I'd like to ghost-write Liz Phair's novel. But I don't really know about that. It seems like a dignified thing to segue into as I approach the other side of 45. My hands are just full right now. There's the potential to try to write some kind of biography of Pavement - sort of a cryptic, nonfiction/fiction blowout. The story's never been told well. But that's a lot of inward-gazing that I'm not sure I want to do. I like to look out.

For the doubters out there, of course I was going to have help from Penguin's editorial team in telling my story, which I talked about from the beginning.

Just because someone may or may not have someone that writes some words for them doesn't mean that, A, they don't have to kill it on the performance, and, B, they don't have to have the ear for what's tight and what's not, which is something a lot of people don't have.

It's common procedure in the industry for people with little or no professional writing experience to get a book deal because of their profile, and then hire a writer.

'Sabotage' was a work for hire. It wasn't my original idea or script or anything.

I haven't written a young-adult book in years. I'm also doing six 'Goosebumps' books a year now.

I've been the desperate writer before. I wrote a novel, and they paid me for it, and I've had those calls from my agent, and I'm like, 'Do you need me to ghost-write a vampire novel? What do you need? I'll do Transformers... tell me!'

Don't see the point in reading ghost-written autobiographies, even though some of these published lives may fascinate me. The 'ghost' is always present, manipulating an interview into first-person singular text, and it feels like I'm reading a lie.

The key to writing for Richard (Pryor) was to just push his buttons and then know when to push the buttons on your cassette recorder. You'd get him started, then surreptitiously start recording when he got inspired and started walking around the room and improvising in character. Then you'd get it all transcribed and take credit for it.