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.
I wish always to be quoted as George Eliot.
...it is a sneaking piece of cowardice for authors to put feigned names to their works, as if, like bastards of their brain, they were afraid to own them.
And I can't think of a reason I'd ever use a pseudonym, as I wouldn't want to publish something that I didn't like enough to put my name on it.
I am George Cockcroft. But when I come to England or Europe, where the name Luke Rhinehart is better known, then I use that name.
When I wrote my stories in elementary school, I signed them all 'Karen E. Bender' with the squiggly 'E.' I wanted, from an early age, to be a writer, and that name - that E - was a way of pretending I knew how to do it.
'Mira Grant' is actually my pseudonym. And 'Seanan' is pronounced 'SHAWN-in.'
I always call him Lewis Carroll Carroll, because he was the first Humbert Humbert.
I was saving the name of 'Geisel' for the Great American Novel.
Whatever may be the success of my stories, I shall be resolute in preserving my incognito, having observed that a nom de plume secures all the advantages without the disagreeables of reputation.
My real name is Madeleine Wickham, under which I write dramas with an edge of humour. As Sophie Kinsella it's fast, all-out comedies, such as the 'Shopaholic' series.
All anyone agreed on was that Kurban Said was the pen name of a writer who had probably come from Baku, an oil city in the Caucasus, and that he was either a nationalist poet who was killed in the Gulags or the dilettante son of an oil millionaire or a Viennese cafe-society writer who died after stabbing himself in the foot.
I'm John Clare now. I was Byron and Shakespeare formerly.
A writer is supposed to have anonymity.
I don't have a pen name, so I'm thinking of getting a doctor's name. What would you call that, a stethoscope name?
Any time something is written against me, I not only share the sentiment but feel I could do the job far better myself. Perhaps I should advise would-be enemies to send me their grievances beforehand, with full assurance that they will receive my every aid and support. I have even secretly longed to write, under a pen name, a merciless tirade against myself.
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.
One of the things you want as a successful writer is the anonymity.
I chose my pen name when I was ten, because I knew even then that my legal name would be more trouble than it was worth.
When I was about 13, and I would write in my journal, I'd be like, 'I just watched 'Spice World,' the Spice Girls movie, and I loved it.' Sometimes I would sign them with the name Xen.
I wrote two novels about a yoga studio in Los Angeles published by Penguin under the pen name Rain Mitchell.
I think maybe I might have to do what some other authors do, which is do a variation on my name, just to send readers the message that, 'Yep, this is me, but this is a different part of me. So brace yourself.'
I wish I didn't have ever to sign my long name on the cover of a book, and I wish I could write a story that would seem absolutely true to the child who hears it and to myself.
This book had two authors, and they were both the same person.
