People really want to think that these things really happened. I don’t know why that important, but I know that when I finish reading a novel or something, I want to know how much of that really happened to this author.
The only real mystery in the stories of political plagiarism is its durability in an age of Turnitin and other scanning software that can protect an author from his own mistakes, intentional or otherwise.
My personal interest in IVF led me to author two reports into the availability of treatment on the NHS.
For a memoir to really succeed, the author has to do such hard work before they come to the page. They have to do a brutal self-examination of everything they believe to be true.
Margaret Atwood was the author who took me out of children’s literature and guided me towards adult literature.
Being a best-selling author doesn’t make you a millionaire. It’s not like Stephen King.
I should have been deliriously happy. I had my dream come true. I’m a best-selling author. So why is everything in my life, including my writing, going bad?
For the black author, and even the ex-slave narrator, creativity has often lain with the lie – forging an identity, ‘making’ one, but ‘lying’ about one, too.
I know very well that one cannot become an author by just writing a book.
Didn’t you know I’m going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don’t feel badly, I didn’t either!
I’m fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, ‘Author of ‘Angels in America’ dies.’ Unless I’m completely forgotten, and then it won’t say anything at all.
Since my romance novels had all been thrillers as well, it wasn’t such a leap for me to move into the straight thriller genre. The most difficult part, I think, was being accepted as a thriller writer. Once you’ve written romance, unfortunately, critics will never stop calling you a ‘former romance author.’
Quite often I can be in a bookshop, standing beneath a great big picture of myself and paying for a book with a credit card clearly marked John Grisham, yet no one recognises me. I often say I’m a famous author in a country where no one reads.
No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.
One of the ironies of being a professional writer is that, if you are even moderately successful, the very traits that let you succeed as a writer are not much help when the time comes to head out as ‘The Author.’
Once the world has been created, the fantasy author still has to bring the story’s characters to life and unfold a gripping plot. That’s why good fantasy is such a hard act to bring off.
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.
The great children’s author and illustrator Shirley Hughes marks her 90th birthday by appearing as Michael Berkeley’s guest in ‘Private Passions’.
An author who speaks about their own books is almost as bad as a mother who speaks about her own children.
When I started writing after my career as an actor, I knew that that other life in the film industry would be pulled into my writing life and that people would see me not as an author but as an actor starting to write.
The distribution might which Penguin brought to the table and the stature they gave me as an author is unparalleled.
You have plausible deniability, as they say in politics, as an author with movies. Because if the movie is terrible, you simply say they failed to catch the genius of the book.
I’m fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, ‘Author of ‘Angels in America’ dies.’ Unless I’m completely forgotten, and then it won’t say anything at all.
I know why people lie to themselves in life, but I’ll never understand the appeal of the dishonest theater where the actor doesn’t make some earnest attempt to include their own honest humanity in their collaboration with an author. It’s so ugly to me that it hurts sometimes to see it happen.
As an inspiration to the author, I do not think the cat can be over-estimated. He suggests so much grace, power, beauty, motion, mysticism. I do not wonder that many writers love cats; I am only surprised that all do not.
Becoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they’re made, they never seem quite as sacred again.
Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the Fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author and were never intended to be understood as real people, who actually lived in history.
In music, you can use metaphors with ease – if a person doesn’t understand the parable, they can still enjoy the melody of the music. If, however, a person reads a book and misses the meaning of its metaphors, this will be extremely disheartening for both the reader as well as the author.
Endnotes, often confused with footnotes that live at the bottom of a page, is that lump of text at the end of the book, sometimes even relegated to a tiny font size. They’re often forgotten but, in nonfiction, particularly history books, can offer a fascinating footprint into the author’s research, a joyful, geeky abyss.
I love books; my suitcases are always full of them. Books and shoes. I read when I am sad, when I am happy, when I am nervous. My favourite British author is Jane Austen, and my favourite American one is John O’Hara.
I remain convinced that the most valuable use of time for a newly published author is to write a second book that’s even better than the first, and a third that’s better than the second, and on and on.
I think that the continuity of what I do as an editor with what I did when I started out 40 years ago is very direct. The delivery system is changing and will continue to, but the actual interaction between publisher and author is exactly the same.
An actor’s job is about putting across the author’s intention; I don’t think of myself on the same level as a creator.
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.
No author’s writing more influenced my own than that of Robert Louis Stevenson. My first steampunk story, ‘The Ape-box Affair,’ is a sort of melange of Stevenson and P.G. Wodehouse.
Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn’t by living the lives of his or her characters.
I am a completely horizontal author. I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy. I’ve got to be puffing and sipping.
That’s the most terrible thing about being an author – standing there at your mother’s funeral, but you don’t switch the author off. So your own innermost thoughts are grist for the mill. Who was it said – one of the famous lady novelists – ‘unhappy is the family that contains an author’?
In some instances, I would say the writer does deserve equal billing with the director. In other instances the director – especially if he wrote part of the script himself – is clearly more the author of the movie.
Amendments occupy a great deal of most legislators’ time, particularly those lawmakers in the minority. Members of Congress do author major bills, but more commonly they make minor adjustments to the bigger bill.
Out of respect to writers, you have to read the book in the way in which the author visualised it going out into the world.
I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author’s world.
It is essential to naturalist doctrine that literature, to be good, must, finally, be the author’s experience worked out literally.
I do my best to build a strong factual foundation for each of my novels and rely upon my author’s notes to keep my conscience clear.
Everything is different – except for publishing itself: getting hold of an amazing author, working to make his or her book the best and best-looking it can be, telling the world.
I can tell you from experience that God’s help and presence in our lives is vital. He is the Author of all true success and everything that is good-without Him, we can do nothing of true value.
My go-to author for knowing it all is Evelyn Waugh. ‘A Handful of Dust’ is as perfect as a book can get.
A memoir is not an autobiography. It’s a true story told as a novel, using techniques of novelization. The author is allowed to compress events, combine characters, change names, change the sequence of events, just as if he’s writing a novel. But it’s got to be true.
I was definitely meant to be a young adult author, and I love it – I’m here to stay!
I couldn’t really experience being an author when I was still working in publishing – I was trying to negotiate being both. Sometimes the knowledge doesn’t translate between the two roles.
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.
