It’s interesting what pops out of an author’s subconscious when he’s not thinking about it.
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 think of myself as a very lazy author.
A photo app is a utility. It’s like comparing ‘Twitter’ to Microsoft Word. If you want to be an author, you’re not always going to constrain yourself to 140 characters.
Our life is a book that writes itself and whose principal themes sometimes escape us. We are like characters in a novel who do not always understand what the author wants of them.
It seems like every few years a big name author will holler something about how evil, heinous, and morally wrong fan fiction and fan fiction writers are, and then the Internet gets all upset and shocked, and then the author is shocked that people could get so upset.
A novel wouldn’t be a book if there weren’t some flights of fancy on the part of the author, stopping time to examine things, or to tell a joke.
Unlike a typical professional, I can’t quit my job to become a full-time author; I don’t have that luxury. For me, writing is therapy; if I choose to write full-time, it might start feeling like work.
An author departs, he does not die.
One of the great currents in the contemporary experience of art is that it seems to come out of the experience of the author.
It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.
A crime is like a crack in reality, and it is the author’s role to explore those cracks. As a writer, I like to see how they impinge on people.
I was a very happy banker, but I feel happier as an author.
Now I’m not an author, I’m a writer, that’s all I am.
Shakespeare’s naturalness is attested to by the strange fact that he is the only classical author who remains popular. The critical termites are massed and eating away at the foundations, trying to topple him. Whether they will succeed will be a test of his robustness.
As an author, it’s a strange process to watch your novel turned into a movie. It’s tremendously exciting but somewhat voyeuristic; after all, novelists are rarely involved in the process.
I’m mainly an airport author, and if you’re trying to take your mind off the journey, you’re not going to read ‘King Lear.’
If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.
When I look back at my career as an author, I don’t look at the first book that was ever published as to where my career began – I look to the first book that I ever wrote.
There is no God, Nature sufficeth unto herself; in no wise hath she need of an author.
George V. Higgins’s ‘The Friends of Eddie Coyle’ (1970) added an extra literary layer to the con novel; James Crumley’s ‘The Last Good Kiss’ (1978) influenced countless writers and will be remembered forever for its opening line, quoted often in obituaries of the author.
Choose an author as you choose a friend.
I want to be an author.
‘Into the Blizzard’ follows the author as he traces the footsteps of the Newfoundland Regiment during the First World War: where they trained in Scotland, where they fought in Gallipoli and where they died at the Battle of the Somme in France.
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.
If you’re going to abridge a book in the author’s own words, you can’t go sticking your own in.
If there is no love between the author and the story, there is no love between the reader and the story.
One shouldn’t ever be conscious of the author as lecturer. When social or moral points are too heavily stressed, I always get uncomfortable.
Oftentimes when you see adaptations of books you like, you’re let down. As an author, you assume that they are going to suck. A little bit of hope is dangerous.
The one thing I’ve always done as an author is talk to my publicists. Because they have all the best stories – and they have all the dirt on other, more famous and important writers. They’re not supposed to talk about it, but sometimes you can get awesome little tidbits from them.
I actually own a copy of my own book; that’s how dedicated I am as an author.
No sensible author wants anything but praise.
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’?
As a middle-aged woman who has had some luck as a writer, I’d like this profession of author to remain a possibility for young writers in the future – and not become an arena solely for the hobbyist or the well-heeled.
As a journalist for 35 years, and now author for 20, I’ve learned that there’s always more.
I’m unique for a suspense author in that I don’t have a specialty background. A lot of suspense writers used to be lawyers or crime beat reporters. I didn’t even know a cop when I started out. I finally figured out that I could visit prisons – I just had to be willing to make the phone calls.
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.
‘Flaubert’s Parrot’ is an amphibious book in which what appears to be a personal essay about Flaubertian writing is gradually, delicately transformed into an extremely sad novel in which the differences between character, author, and narrator are less clear than they appear at first glance.
My wife and I set up the business, we were always very open about it and had a business author’s name as many authors do.
I’m an active author: I travel to give readings and talks, although I know it’s risky.
When we see a natural style, we are astonished and charmed; for we expected to see an author, and we find a person.
As an author, you’re really grateful for the people who are supporting you, but on some other level, that can be a dangerous echo chamber.
Buy other authors’ books when you go to their events. Even if you aren’t going to read it. Even if you are going to give it away. Even if you aren’t interested. Not just for the author but for the bookstore. It’s karma and just plain good manners.
The best books arise from some ultimate question in the author.
A novel can enlarge the empathy and imagination of both its author and its reader, and my experience, that sense of enlargement is most intense when I’m transported beyond the narrow limits of my daily life.
What SF author or fan isn’t interested in human space travel? I’ve yet to meet one.
An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference – a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.
I think that I had read so much fiction that the craft itself sort of sank into me. I didn’t read any ‘how to’ books or attend any popular-fiction-writing classes or have a critique group. For many years into my writing, I didn’t even know another author. For me, a lot of reading was the best teacher.
I identify as an agent when I’m agenting, and I identify as an author when I’m writing. I expect both those things to be true for as long as I’m able to do them.
As an author, I really hate a reader like me. There’s no loyalty.
‘The Prince’s blunt candor has been a scandal for 500 years. The book was placed on the Papal Index of banned books in 1559, and its author was denounced on the Elizabethan stages of London as the ‘Evil Machiavel.’ The outrage has not dimmed with time.
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.
In every author let us distinguish the man from his works.
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.
Whenever I’ve had to tamper with history for plot purposes, I make sure to mention that in my author’s note, and I try to keep such tampering to a bare minimum. I also attempt to keep my characters true to their historical counterparts. This is not always possible, of course.
There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.
My first feature, I made in France. There’s a great respect for the author there – they don’t change your stuff.
There are only three indispensable things: the audience, the actor and the author. The rest is dross.
My favourite author is Leon Trotsky – the political philosophy and the way he writes is beautiful, and really relevant, too.
When you read books, you kind of create that whole world in your mind, and you go on a journey with the author of that book. I think that’s really a good thing.
Cloud Atlas’ is but one of a long list of titles deemed unfilmable, by author and movie moguls alike, until it was, well, filmed.
