Male authors always take care to make their heroes at least one inch taller than they are, and considerably more muscular. Just as female authors give their heroines better hair and slimmer thighs.
When I moved from Cambridge, I donated all my fiction. I carefully cut out pages the authors had autographed for me. I didn’t want those autographed books showing up on eBay.
There are certain authors that do not turn students on; it is the truth. Homer happens to be one of them.
We decided we wanted the site to provide readers with fresh new stories to enjoy between major book releases by their favorite authors while allowing those same authors to flex their creative muscles.
There are many traditionally published authors who have hated the cover their publisher’s decided on. Or the title or the marketing or the advertising. But there was nothing they could do about it.
One of my favorite authors is Robert Cormier. He was a devout Catholic and a very nice man, which might not be the impression you get from reading his books.
There’s a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don’t believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.
I have an agent, John Brockman, who is an agent to many academic authors like Dan Gilbert and Steven Pinker, and he’s very good at conning academics into writing books. He pulled this trick on me.
When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author.
November is Jewish book month, so Jewish Community Centers all around the country have book fairs where they invite authors and sell books in advance of the holidays.
As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work – physically – in the same way.
A writers’ ring is where a group of four or five authors agree to promote each other’s work on their own websites and via their social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter.
Often in the past, there have been authors that were deeply disappointed in their adaptation, but that’s because they haven’t accepted the fact that a movie is a different thing, and it can’t possibly be the same as the book.
I have so many favorite authors; I can’t name just one.
I’ve noticed that, with many of the authors I like, I tend to think I would dislike them as human beings or that there’d be a healthy amount of debate if I ever did meet them.
I want people to be the authors of their own life story.
I simply don’t understand authors that know everything before they write it; it seems so cold blooded. I think it’s lovely when the story takes over and goes somewhere else.
Smart authors, faced with storms, chose to create umbrellas. That’s why a diverse group of authors banded together to create The Fiction Writer’s Co-op, which will work to find innovative ways to promote each other’s work and cheer each other on in a very competitive field.
I could hear music playing in the background of works by certain authors, like Poe and Shakespeare. And I discovered Nikki Giovanni when I was in eighth grade. Her writing has a musical energy with pulse and rhythm, almost like jazz or hip-hop.
Too many trees are killed to print the words of people who may not have all that much to say, and authors and journalists are equally culpable in this regard.
I like to read fiction, and I particularly enjoy reading young adult fiction. But I also read children’s books, adult books, current authors, and classics, but I like fiction the most.
I have this theory that the likeability question comes up so much more with female characters created by female authors than it does with male characters and male authors.
I did teach elementary school for quite a while, and so I didn’t have to reach too far back for the titles and authors that populate the early chapters ‘of The Borrower.’
All attempts at gaining literary polish must begin with judicious reading, and the learner must never cease to hold this phase uppermost. In many cases, the usage of good authors will be found a more effective guide than any amount of precept.
The Internet offers authors and their readers a new diversity of opportunities and freedom.
The children of great authors do not, as a rule, become writers.
If I could visit dead authors, I’d head right over to E. B. White, though I’m so in awe of him I’d probably just sit at his feet and weep. He’s the master of clarity, of understated humor, of palatable political conviction.
There’s no doubt that scientific training helps many authors to write better science fiction. And yet, several of the very best were English majors who could not parse a differential equation to save their lives.
Generally, my notes and outlines comprise more words than my novels. I suppose that’s one reason I’m a comparatively slow writer, something that has always bothered me given the fact that other authors can turn out a book every six months while I usually take about two years.
I love finding out how authors work, because it can either go full Carrie in ‘Homeland,’ with loads of Post-it Notes and string on the wall and they know everything that’s happening in the plot – or they let the characters tell them where they want to go and what happens next.
Authors have a nationality; books do not.
I’ve been drawing authors and politicians for newspapers for many years. I try to read up on the person; in the case of authors, read one of their books. I watch interviews via YouTube and collect pictures via the Internet.
Paranormal fiction offers authors – and readers – the chance to answer the question, ‘What if?’ All the different ways that question can be answered make for extremely entertaining reading.
As a child I’d sit at dinner parties with artists, authors and musicians, some of the best people in their fields. I couldn’t avoid the path I took having grown up in such an artistic environment.
Authors don’t tend to stay with the same agents and editors over their entire lifetimes, but Grafton worked with Marian Wood, her editor at Putnam, from Kinsey’s first outing, and signed with Molly Friedrich, still her literary agent, with the publication of ‘B Is for Burglar.’
In comparing various authors with one another, I have discovered that some of the gravest and latest writers have transcribed, word for word, from former works, without making acknowledgment.
Most of the more celebrated names among African-American authors, poets, and artists are known to the world because of their association with specific cultural arts movements.
I think male authors who want to try to tackle these issues of representation of women can generally do a better job if they try to question traditional notions of masculinity and the sort of toxic nature of traditional ways of presenting masculinity.
I don’t read a lot of fiction, but one of my favorite authors is William Kennedy; his books, to me, almost read like historical dramas because the mythologies are so detailed as he wove fiction with the factual history of Albany.
In 1996, when my first novel, ‘Masquerade,’ was published, I knew international thrillers – or spy novels, if you prefer – had been the domain of male authors for decades.
I think that whether we acknowledge it or not, our opinions as authors always influence our work. How can they not?
I’m probably one of the few authors in this country who could very comfortably live off my writing.
God will finish what He authors, but He is not obligated to finish what He has not authored.
Authors like cats because they are such quiet, lovable, wise creatures, and cats like authors for the same reasons.
My mum was a children’s librarian, so I spent a lot of time in the library. My reading life, because of my mum’s work, was evenly split between American, Canadian, Australian and British authors.
Authors by the hundreds can tell you stories by the thousands of those rejection slips before they found a publisher who was willing to ‘gamble’ on an unknown.
As white authors, bloggers, and readers, we must stop promoting diversity as a business opportunity or a chance to buy ally points with our disposable income.
Even the contemporary horror authors who have seriously influenced me are a disparate bunch.
I am one of those authors who consider it their highest honour and their highest liberty to have a completely untrammelled chance of using their pens to serve the working people.
At every writers’ conference, you have the opportunity to hear from best-selling authors, top literary agents, and excellent editors who will demystify the publishing industry and give you great advice, no matter where you are in your writing career or what you’re currently struggling with.
The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.
I am particularly wary of authors who put themselves on the cover of their own book.
I take time with each person and try to remember them, especially if they’re a repeater from another event. I know a lot of authors just sign a book and keep their heads down, but I’m not like that.
