Quotes of All Topics . Occasions . Authors
You never want to be in a position where your reader feels like you're passing judgment on your own characters. Any novel where you feel like the author is talking to the reader over the characters' heads is in a bad place.
In a sense, any story that anyone writes is going to be autobiographical - whether it deals directly with the author's experience or not - because it captures what we're obsessed with while working on that particular piece.
Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.
The royalty any author gets is dependent on his track record and marketability and often on the price of his book, too. The higher you price a book, the more comfortable your publisher will be in paying you a higher royalty.
I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.
The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.
I can't inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I'd like to spare the world more author or professor novels.
A number of people have read 'Two-Way Split' and made certain assumptions about what the author's like, and I'm highly disappointing to them. I don't drink, I don't eat meat; that's very disappointing for a hard-boiled writer.
When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about.
I was first published as a paranormal author back in the early 1990s. I was one of the founders of that original wave of paranormal and am the leader of the new wave of paranormal that started at the beginning of this century.
I think it's fascinating to look at a world that an author has created that has sort of stemmed from the world now, and usually dystopian books point out something about our current world and exaggerates a tendency or a belief.
I know that I am a singer and an actor, yet in order to give the public the impression that I am neither one nor the other, but the real man conceived by the author, I have to feel and to think as the man the author had in mind.
A play is not a play until it's performed, and unless it's a one-person play that is acted, directed and designed by the author, many other people will be deeply involved in the complicated process that leads to its performance.
I didn't understand in the beginning that the editor didn't want me to know the author. I'd make an effort to meet the author, but it would end up being a disaster because then I had the author telling me what I should be doing.
My typical morning involves some time on the treadmill, but obviously I skip that a lot. Mostly, I wake up, check my email, then get to work on the various interviews and questions and phone calls that come with being an author.
I focus on the elements of a movie that are meant to invisibly affect me as a viewer. The edges. As an author, I'm aware of how the subconscious things can pluck at a reader's emotions, and I love it when filmmakers do the same.
I've discovered as an author that the process of writing a novel becomes harder over time, not easier. I used to think the reverse must be true, that it would be like any task, and the more I practiced, the more adept I'd become.
If the day gets really bad, I can always pull out fan mail. Who else gets mail where kids write to you and say, 'Dear Mr. Scieszka, we were supposed to write to our favorite author, but Roald Dahl is dead. So I'm writing to you.'
Herta Muller, Mo Yan, Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio - for many of us, the Nobels have become doubly educational: We simultaneously learn of an author's existence and find out that we ought to have been reading him or her all along.
Ever since I was twelve, I dreamed of being an author. I just never had the fortitude to see any of my stories through to completion. I would start a book, get a few chapters in, and grow bored or get distracted by something else.
Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.
That's the miracle of Amazon! It's like Internet dating. In the early days, you could get slimed as an author on Amazon by someone bearing a grudge, or jealous, or whatever. And because there were so few reviews posted, this stank.
I want people to think of me as a 'Mindset' guy, a journalist, a commentator, a social media personality, a filmmaker, an author, but I got to - I have to pivot so far away from anything pro-Trump, I just got to keep going that way.
This first print run of the first edition of my first novel, 'When The Lion Feeds.' back in 1964, is so rare it can fetch several thousand pounds at auction. I always wanted to be an author, and I decided to write about what I knew.
Overall, I adhere to the one guiding rule any author writing historical fiction should follow: whatever you describe has to be possible. It may not be common, obvious, or even all that probable, but it absolutely has to be possible.
Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it's literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author curses like the very devil. What's at issue is how we describe the way the civilising works.
As an author on a corporate press, you have a lot less control over the finished product. I figure if I spend a couple years writing something, I want to be able to decide what the cover looks like and how it's going to be presented.
Usually, an author writes a manuscript that is handed in to the editor. The editor will then work with an art director to find just the right illustrator for the job, and off they go. Many times, the illustrator and author never meet.
Ideas improve. The meaning of words participates in the improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress implies it. It embraces an author's phrase, makes use of his expressions, erases a false idea, and replaces it with the right idea.
Just keep writing, and try to finish that novel. Remember, all authors started exactly where you are right now; the only difference between a published author and a non-published one is that the published author never stopped writing.
I'd like to walk into a room sometime and be introduced as the author of something other than that play. There's always one thing in a career that has more impact than anything else. In my case, 'The Subject Was Roses' was that thing.
In the world of book writing, an author really gets to have control over what he or she writes, which is why it is very satisfying. With the help of a great compatible editor, you really have something in the end you can call your own.
Both villains and heroes are a bit boring, really, unless they're flawed and broken somehow. If they're not flawed and broken, then clearly they need to be broken and made flawed. That's what an author does if he or she has any dignity.
In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.
I have one rule when adapting any text: nothing gets added; all the words are the original author's own. But in the ordering and recreation of the story, I can do as I please, and to me, the heart and the point of 'Dracula' is appetite.
I'm not an author, but as a songwriter, I'm afforded this kind of luxurious ambiguity in songs of being able to confess the secrets of my relationships with people and face basically no consequences, or ask for no approval or permission.
Literary critics, however, frequently suffer from a curious belief that every author longs to extend the boundaries of literary art, wants to explore new dimensions of the human spirit, and if he doesn't, he should be ashamed of himself.
Each book tends to have its own identity rather than the author's. It speaks from itself rather than you. Each book is unlike the others because you are not bringing the same voice to every book. I think that keeps you alive as a writer.
I became an author because I love words. I enjoyed playing with them when I was a kid, writing stories and plays, and doing whatever I could think to do with words. I kept my love of them growing up and still love to see what they can do.
I don't tend to be a nitpicker when I'm watching movies, so as long as something is true to the spirit of the original, that's very much what we got for. You try to never do something that the original author wouldn't have done themselves.
As a girl, I sat awestruck at the feet of Harriet Ne, author of 'Tales of Molokai'. It was she who used to say, 'I myself have seen it,' after telling a particularly hair-raising ghost story - a phrase that I borrowed for one of my titles.
Every single day, authors read at bookstores and libraries - and coffeeshops and bars - all over the country. And these readings are amazing: you get to hear the book in the author's own voice, ask questions, and meet the writer. For free.
I have been luckier than anyone I know or even heard of. I had a very happy childhood, a good education, I enjoyed working as a teacher, journalist and author. I have loved a wonderful man for over 33 years, and I believe he loves me, too.
I certainly think that the publishing houses have to learn more about this informal network of literary blogging and get over the idea that sending an author on a book tour - to Dallas, Houston, Los Angeles - is a successful model anymore.
When Chipotle asked me to take part in the Cultivating Thought program both as an author and an essay contest judge, I was excited by the idea of sharing my story through this unique channel and helping young, inspiring writers do the same.
I started 'Storyline' after I'd accomplished all my goals and still wasn't happy. I'd become a 'New York Times' bestselling author, which was my goal from high school, and yet I was less happy after accomplishing my goals than I was before.
One of the differences between what happens when an author and a gossip columnist sit down to write a book is that the former tends to make every effort at disguising and protecting their sources, while the latter doesn't particularly care.
My childhood was a mix of ballet classes and debating society. I liked arguing. As a teenager, I wanted to be an author. Later on, inspired by Young Enterprise and the Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, I decided I wanted to go into business.
What inspired me to become an author? I think it was the snow in New York. I looked out the window and I said, 'Well, I have to get dressed every morning to go to teach, but if I write a book, I can stay home in my bathrobe, eat candy corn.'
One of the biggest differences between you and a traditionally published author is that a self-pubbed author is responsible for everything. Not just writing the book - but cover design, editing, producing, distribution, and publicity as well.