“Collaborations are unnatural. The writer is a jealous god. He builds his universe without interference. He resents the carping of mentally deficient critics, and the editor’s capricious demands for revisions. Let two writers try to make one universe, and their defenses get in the way.”

—  Larry Niven , book N-Space

Building the Mote in God’s Eye (with Jerry Pournelle) (p. 442)
Short fiction, N-Space (1990)

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Feb. 23, 2022. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Collaborations are unnatural. The writer is a jealous god. He builds his universe without interference. He resents the …" by Larry Niven?
Larry Niven photo
Larry Niven 138
American writer 1938

Related quotes

James Thurber photo
William Faulkner photo

“Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory.”

William Faulkner (1897–1962) American writer

Paris Review interview (1958)
Context: Let the writer take up surgery or bricklaying if he is interested in technique. There is no mechanical way to get the writing done, no shortcut. The young writer would be a fool to follow a theory. Teach yourself by your own mistakes; people learn only by error. The good artist believes that nobody is good enough to give him advice. He has supreme vanity. No matter how much he admires the old writer, he wants to beat him.

Julian Barnes photo
Isaac Asimov photo

“Writing is a lonely job. Even if a writer socializes regularly, when he gets down to the real business of his life, it is he and his type writer or word processor. No one else is or can be involved in the matter.”

Isaac Asimov (1920–1992) American writer and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, known for his works of science fiction …

Source: I. Asimov

T.S. Eliot photo

“A critic can only review the book he has read, not the one which the writer wrote.”

Mignon McLaughlin (1913–1983) American journalist

The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Unclassified

Anton Chekhov photo

“Writers are as jealous as pigeons.”

Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) Russian dramatist, author and physician

Letter to I.L. Leontev (February 4, 1888)
Letters

Saul Bellow photo

“All a writer has to do to get a woman is to say he's a writer. It's an aphrodisiac.”

Saul Bellow (1915–2005) Canadian-born American writer

As quoted in "Dailer's Choice" by Harriet Van Horne, in New York Magazine Vol. 10, No. 13 (28 March 1977), p. 80
General sources

Joe Trohman photo

“Patrick’s a very prolific writer. He’s a one-of-a-kind kind of guy. You’ve got to let him do his thing. You don’t want to get too up in his grill, sort of speak.”

Joe Trohman (1984) American musician

My Heart Will Always Be The B-Side To My Tongue (2004), Ultimate Guitar Interview (2008)

Karl Popper photo

“If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.”

Karl Popper (1902–1994) Austrian-British philosopher of science

As quoted in Omnipotence and Other Theological Mistakes by Charles Hartshorne (1984)
Context: Appealing to his [Einstein's] way of expressing himself in theological terms, I said: If God had wanted to put everything into the universe from the beginning, He would have created a universe without change, without organisms and evolution, and without man and man's experience of change. But he seems to have thought that a live universe with events unexpected even by Himself would be more interesting than a dead one.

Related topics