Unfortunately, we are not painters and authors, where we can do something in isolation. We require a lot of money to create what we create. It’s almost like being an architect: You can’t be an architect and build whatever buildings you want to.
Authors I’ve longed to write like – but realize I actually can’t even begin to – include Poe, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Kafka, Daniil Kharms, Witold Gombrowicz, Emily Dickinson, Robert Walser, Barbara Comyns, Ntozake Shange, Camille Laurens, Zbigniew Herbert, and Jose Saramago.
I come from a family of linguists. My maternal grandparents have been authors and translators.
Almost all novels are improved by cutting from the top. On their first pages, authors parade those favourite effects which disgust the impartial reader.
God authors desires in your heart, then fulfills His Will by enabling you to realize those desires.
I don’t want to be like other authors and say that there are only a few story lines in literature. A story is like a human face. We have as many stories as human faces. You might have similar facial features, but they’re all a little different.
Of all the diversions of life, there is none so proper to fill up its empty spaces as the reading of useful and entertaining authors.
Many authors hate to go on grinding book tours. But I’ve always found it a useful way to be a foreign correspondent in America and take the pulse of the country.
As authors, we all have to learn not to be reactive to public statements about our books. It’s really not our business what each reader thinks of them.
On the whole, books are indeed less finite than ourselves. Even the worst among them outlast their authors – mainly because they occupy a smaller amount of physical space than those who penned them. Often they sit on the shelves absorbing dust long after the writer himself has turned into a handful of dust.
The gospels were, in fact, written anywhere from forty to a hundred years after Jesus, and their authors attempted to demonstrate that Jesus could be seen to fulfill various Old Testament pronouncements.
I can only tell you that eggs, country ham, biscuits, a pot of coffee, a morning paper, a table by the window overlooking the veranda and putting green, listening to the idle chitchat of competitors, authors, wits and philosophers, hasn’t exactly been a torturous way to begin each day at the Masters all these years.
In non-fiction, I like Wayne Dyer. I have a compilation of his best quotes near my bed! To me he’s one of the finest authors.
Print-on-demand publishing is the new farm system for new voices in fiction. Authors who have compelling things to say, who can market their stories in compelling ways, will succeed.
I think that black fiction authors have to work very hard to avoid being typed as seeking only a black audience.
I know one writer who has been subscribing authors without their permission and sending out what she thinks are helpful advice sheets, but they come off as if she’s a know-it-all. She thinks she’s marketing herself and her work. All she’s really doing is turning readers off.
Amazon is such a big player in publishing, but a lot of authors feel this connection to their publishing house and their editors who helped them get their books out there, so their loyalties tend to go that way.
Men’s memoirs are about answers; women’s memoirs are about questions. Most male authors want to look good in their memoirs and have a place in posterity, while most women know that posterity is what happens when you no longer care. Women want to connect with others here and now; they couldn’t care less about legacy!
Though by whim, envy, or resentment led, they damn those authors whom they never read.
Most books, like their authors, are born to die; of only a few books can it be said that death has no dominion over them; they live, and their influence lives forever.
Terrorists have goals beyond their supposed pacts with God. They are authors, too.
Editing is such a voyeuristic treat for me. I land on a theme and ask authors to pen works that fit the topic.
I love to read the kind of books I write. Genre-breaking. Fresh-concept. World-building. My all-time top three authors would have to be Cormac McCarthy, Thomas Harris, and Pat Conroy.
Publishers, editors, agents all have one thing in common, aside from their love of cocktail parties. It’s an incredible taste and an ability to find and nurture authors.
Authors change publishers because it’s like being married for a long time and suddenly you want to go out and have a wild affair! No, not seriously, sometimes the deal is more interesting with a new publisher, and other times they have more enthusiasm for your books.
I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.
As authors evolve and try to trace the precedents that have shaped their work, it sometimes becomes a matter of identifying the shadowy figure in the back row of the mental photograph, or of grabbing at the tail of a memory that’s just slipping out the window into thin air.
I had never read Victorian novels before going overseas. I read a handful of authors, but I had not immersed myself in the literature of the 19th century.
As for advice for aspiring authors, the best I can give is to be brave. It sounds like a simple enough thing, but it’s not. Rejection is such an integral part of this journey, and it never goes away.
Authors make stuff up. Let’s not pretend it’s any more magical than that.
Nalini Singh, J.D. Robb, Patricia Briggs, Shelby Reed – these are my pre-order, must-have authors.
I am a big believer in the fact that all authors really write only one book.
The parallels between a stage and a book are compelling. You, like all authors, create ‘characters’ in a ‘setting’ who speak ‘dialogue’ encased in ‘scenes.’ Most importantly, you – like the playwright – have an ‘audience.’
Social media buzz can lead to huge successes when people spread the word about something they love and want to share. But authors creating their own buzz? Making their own noise? It’s hard to make a lot of noise on our own about our own work. Except, sadly, negative noise.
I had one of those defining moments in the fourth grade when my teacher said the story I wrote was the best in the class, and therefore I would be going Young Authors Conference where I’d get to hang out with authors all day.
We see a new generation of Russian authors who are not divided from their Western contemporaries either culturally or philosophically.
I was 17 when I wrote a collection of short stories and wanted it published but it didn’t happen. A lot of publishing houses don’t allow young authors to enter into writing segments.
Of course YA authors have a responsibility to their audience.
If you can find collaborators whose strengths compliment your own, the result can be more than the sum of its authors.
I’m especially interested in projects from authors who were always wonderful writers but who got stuck in the midlist mire due to the challenges of traditional publishing.
I’ve done a lot of interviews of the last few years, and I’ve actually started a list of questions that it would be fun to ask an author, but no respectable interviewer would ever ask. Since I’m not respectable, I’m going to start doing interviews with some authors I know, just for fun.
A dramatic spending increase to fund the SEC and the CFTC, as envisioned by the authors of the Dodd-Frank legislation, would further the mindset that our nation’s problems can be solved with more spending, not more efficiency.
Let authors write for glory and reward. The truth is well paid when she is sung and heard.
I started messing around in my teen years but didn’t really begin training properly until the age of 21. I did a lot of reading prior to that – Mike Mentzer, Arthur Jones and all other notable bodybuilding authors – and just came up with a routine that worked for me.
In quoting of books, quote such authors as are usually read; others you may read for your own satisfaction, but not name them.
Like many writers, I’m usually more interested in reading about authors than their actual works. We’re more curious to know how they were written than what they are like to read.
One of the things that all authors of fiction must learn to judge is whether – and in what detail – to describe the face of a character.
I love reading religious authors. Especially in the sort of circle I move in, people tend to be more secular, and I love reading books by just really smart people of religious faith. It’s always a really cool perspective.
Soon after publishing a book for kids, my mailbox began to fill with letters from children all across America. Not because my novels for young readers are bestsellers – they’re not by a long shot – but because today’s kids love to write to authors.
I get my inspiration from looking at the world and paying attention to people and just looking closely. Also from reading. I get so much inspiration from other authors.
How many authors are there among writers? Author means originator.
The idea of copyright did not exist in ancient times, when authors frequently copied other authors at length in works of non-fiction. This practice was useful, and is the only way many authors’ works have survived even in part.
