Top 242 Authors Quotes

I’ve had a dozen novels published and have made far more than a dozen mistakes. Which is why Randy Susan Meyers and I wrote a guidebook to help authors avoid making our mistakes.

We all need each other in publishing to make publishing work for authors in a variety of formats now and in the future. Anyone who thinks publishers don’t bring anything to the table has a very narrow view and lack of knowledge about the industry as a whole.

What I do is write books for an audience that thinks in a movie language. That’s the way I think, and I also believe that not enough authors keep up with the audience.

I love reading. I’ve had the chance to meet some of my favorite authors, that’s been really cool.

For me, it’s been a treat to interact with authors who were publishing when I was a young reader. Judy Blume once gave me a pep talk at a writing conference. I had a short story featured in the same anthology as Beverly Cleary. Magic.

My biggest concern about the market is the force that acts to drive down price, because I think that’s destructive to authors as well as publishers. Our biggest battle is to underline the value of intellectual property.

It feels wonderful to get praise from other authors who I admire, but with each new book, my confidence is always the thing I struggle with the most until I start getting positive feedback from readers.

I like working with authors who are a bit pesky.

There are a lot of authors in the world, so it’s difficult to find a unique niche to present your take on things. That is always a challenge for any author.

Books by women, people of color, LGBTQ authors, differently abled people, and non-Americans are a great way of broadening horizons and building empathy.

The biggest challenge of my career, which is something that authors of genre fiction face all the time, is writing something fresh and new and at the same time meeting reader expectations.

Authors from whom others steal should not complain, but rejoice. Where there is no game there are no poachers.

A study in the Washington Post says that women have better verbal skills than men. I just want to say to the authors of that study: ‘Duh.’

One of my favorite authors, Garbrielle Zevin, she did a book called ‘Elsewhere,’ that is one of my favorites, and I think they’re making that into a movie too. I really want to be in that one just because the story is so beautiful.

Obviously, my name is known now, but I don’t think people generally tend to recognize authors very much. People like J. K. Rowling maybe, Gillian Flynn might be recognized, but I reckon she could walk by me on the street, and I wouldn’t know who she was.

My favourite authors are Milan Kundera and Jeanette Winterson.

The key factor is whether the agent is a member of the Association of Authors’ Representatives, which screens its members and requires them to uphold a Canon of Ethics.

Good authors mature over time: it does take awhile.

I don’t think of myself as a critic at all. I’m a reviewer and essayist. I mainly hope to share with others my pleasure in the books and authors I write about, though sometimes I do need to cavil and point out shortcomings.

Amazon can’t be all good or all bad. I don’t think that everything they do is evil; they’ve given a lot of authors access.

When my French side thinks of ‘bohemian,’ it imagines Montparnasse authors and absinthe – that kind of aesthetic. The American definition might be more tied to American history and culture.

Before novels written by women were relegated to their own ‘genre,’ I was introduced to Jane Smiley by a dear professor who raised my awareness of what female authors were bringing to the table of contemporary fiction.

When I was young, I assumed that authors must have traveled the world or done exotic things in order to tell great stories.

Of the female black authors, I really like Morrison’s early books a lot. But she’s really become so much a clone of Faulkner. He did it better.

I suspect that authors who start their careers writing for an adult audience – and who eventually produce a young adult novel or two – are more common than authors who begin by writing for young adults and who then gravitate toward composing something for an adult audience.

I don’t give plots to Harold Robbins or Graham Greene, because they don’t need them, but a lot of authors do.

Many companies are now promising to educate their employees in a pursuit of a culture that better values and respects diversity and the incredible work of black authors, black owned businesses and grassroot foundations are finally being recognised.

A lot of powerful people in Washington may think it’s a crazy-leftist-fringe position to think the intellectual authors of a torture regime should be investigated and prosecuted.

You couldn’t buy any English authors or anything that came from America, like jeans. It was impossible. So we had to do our own clothes if we had weird ideas like wearing long scarves like the French people did. You had to knit them yourself.

I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favorite weird authors.

If anything, Twitter helps me read about perspectives outside of mainstream media and learn about new authors, artists, and ideas that I don’t always get exposed to in my regular media diet.

I have a private press. I’m a book artist. I publish books of other authors and artists. I do the illustrating. I set the type. I print it myself on my press. I do everything but bind it.

Authors like reading. Go figure. So it’s not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects.

There were speeches made in Congress in the very last session before the outbreak of the Rebellion, so ferocious as to show that their authors were under the influence of a real frenzy.

Every year the literary press praises dozens if not hundreds of novels to the skies, asserting explicitly or implicitly that these books will probably not be suffering water damage in the basements of their authors’ houses 20 years from now. But historically, anyway, that’s not the way the novelistic ecology works.

Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences.

I think the more avenues that open up when people want to publish, the better. Some of the authors that want to jump ship from the traditional houses and go on their own, you know what? Good luck. It’s going to be a lot tougher than you think.

My writings are limited to depicting analytically, but also polemically, the horrors of reality. Redemption is the speciality of other authors, male and female.

Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.

Homer, Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Goethe, Proust – not exactly authors one expects to whiz through or take lightly, but like all works of genius, they are meant to be read out loud and loved.

Picture books, while less in word count, are certainly not less important. There are unbelievably skillful authors writing in this vein. Authors like Jane O’Connor and Jon Scieszka.

A lot of great authors are published before their time. That’s not wrong; it’s just the way it works.

‘The New Jedi Order’ was a pure publishing project: a single massive story – virtually one huge novel spread across multiple volumes – told by a succession of authors.

I sometimes read about authors who say they require a perfectly silent room maintained at precisely 68 degrees, with trash bags taped over the windows and a white-noise machine in the corner to write, and I think, ‘Who are these people, and do any of them have kids?’

When authors who write literary fiction begin to write screenplays, everybody assumes that’s the end. Here’s another who’s never going to write well again.

For me, books were my source of affirmation. Alice Walker, Audrey Lord – it was these authors who wrote about their experiences. It was this weird thing where I was censored in terms of what I could watch but not in terms of what I could read.

Teen authors love to flirt with taboo, to grapple – sensitively – with dark and frightening issues, and there is nothing darker and more frightening than cancer.

As authors, most – most authors, our art is portraying the human condition. Trying to show you what it’s like to be somebody else, trying to make you feel for somebody else. That means you have to have a high degree of empathy.

The Small Business Lending Fund was cleverly named by its authors last Congress. Since its implementation, however, it would appear a more appropriate name would be the Bailed Out Bank Refinancing Fund.

Burmese authors and artists can play the role that artists everywhere play. They help to mold the outlook of a society – not the whole outlook, and they are not the only ones to mold the outlook of society, but they have an important role to play there.

Old wood best to burn, old wine to drink, old friends to trust, and old authors to read.

Pulp paperbacks have always provided a training ground for men, Some of them went on to become respected authors – Dean Koontz, Nelson DeMille and Martin Cruz Smith, for example. Why couldn’t a woman?