Literary Pseudonym Quotes

Trust me, I did not set out to establish three pen names and, for the record, I do not recommend it as a career strategy. The idea back at the start was that I would stick with the name that proved most successful.

I began using pseudonyms early in my career, when I was being paid a quarter a cent a word for my work, and when I had to write a lot to earn a living. Sometimes I had three or four stories in a single magazine without the editor knowing they were all by me.

The Christopher Robin who appears in so many of the poems is not always me. This was where my name, so totally useless to me personally, came into its own: it was a wonderful name for writing poetry round.

It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably masculine about Tiptree’s writing. I don’t think the novels of Jane Austen could have been written by a man nor the stories of Ernest Hemingway by a woman, and in the same way I believe the author of the James Tiptree stories is male.

I love it when people ask if Jennifer Weiner is a pen name. Um, if I wanted a pen name I could have done a LOT better than this!

It's very hard to be an experimental woman writer. If I had been writing under a pseudonym, just initials, I might have a different reputation - but, then I couldn't be myself either.

If you have to pay the bills, and you write something you're not proud of, use a pen-name for that.

I read one of the funniest books last week by Don DeLillo. He wrote this book, 'Amazons' many years ago, under the pseudonym Cleo Birdwell. The book is very funny but I also think it's funny that he denies any involvement with it.

I used the pen name because I knew I wanted to write better novels under my own name someday.

I began writing when I was still in the British Foreign Service, and it was then understood that even if you wrote about butterfly collecting, you used another name.