My life is pretty ordinary in so many ways. I live in a town called Plainville. I have the life of an average dad. It feels like I have this secret identity as an author, and it’s still very surreal to me.
The author takes the position that the consumer pays the tax, and as such every individual of the social order should be given unlimited opportunity to make the most of himself.
I always make a point of keeping the most pleasant-sounding name for the murderer. As he or she is bound to come to an unpleasant end, it seems the very least the author can do.
If you were to ask me to pick my favourite author, well, there are so many of them, I’d really just have to say the first names that came to mind, and I’m sure that I’ll later think ‘Oh, I should have mentioned that one.’
No one likes to feel helpless. We find it psychologically unbearable and inside ourselves we may try to make ourselves part author of our misfortune rather than simply the recipient of it.
One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.
As an author, you need to keep talking to your audience to remind yourself what they like and what they don’t like. You spend most of your life locked in a room, and you need to be social occasionally.
Traditional publishers require an author to submit a manuscript six months in advance, and if pressed, no later than two or three.
Michael Lewis, author of ‘Moneyball,’ got special access for a profile of Obama for ‘Vanity Fair’ – but Obama insisted on redlining his quotes.
I stepped out on faith to follow my lifelong dream of being an author. I made real sacrifices and took big risks. But living, it seems to me, is largely about risk.
If you’re writing a scene for a character with whom you disagree in every way, you still need to show how that character is absolutely justified in his or her own mind, or the scene will come across as being about the author’s views rather than about the character’s.
I am happy because I am no longer an author.
I was on this weird, wild goose chase where I thought I might try to adapt a Willa Cather book. And if you don’t know Willa Cather, she was an author in the early 1900s. And for a while, she wrote these books about New York high society.
The most noble criticism is that in which the critic is not the antagonist so much as the rival of the author.
For pity’s sake, if you don’t take a shine to a novel, there are loads more in the world; read something else. Continue suffering, and it’s not the author’s fault. It’s yours.
There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.
Book tours are almost designed to beat out of an author any affection he has for his book.
A relationship book I once read told women to use the word ‘fun’ whenever possible. The author claimed it had a subliminal aphrodisiac effect on men, who want a relaxed girl attached only to good times – the human equivalent of Diet Coke. This is not me.
I am Superwoman. I am the author of 15 novels, including one about cancer. I am not, however, someone who ‘gets’ cancer. I am a sun worshipper who never thought it could happen to me.
Balancing an illustrator and author can be tricky, but I was an illustrator mostly before I wrote my books.
I have been luckier than anyone I know or even heard of. I had a very happy childhood, a good education, I enjoyed working as a teacher, journalist and author. I have loved a wonderful man for over 33 years, and I believe he loves me, too.
At the end of the 1950s, I started working at a publishing company, Estudios Cor, as production manager, so returning, but not as an author, to the world of letters I had left some years before.
My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author’s voice really is.
I’m a single parent, a working mother, an executive, and an author. My greatest accomplishment will be to raise three wonderful children.
I’ve dealt with depression my entire life, on and off, which makes me the perfect author for teenage readers.
A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.
What had brought me to New York in the autumn of 1972 was a letter of recommendation written by Norman Mailer, the author of ‘The Naked and the Dead’ and American literature’s leading heavyweight contender, to Dan Wolf, the delphic editor of ‘The Village Voice.’
I’ve been reading ‘The Sisterhood,’ and I love the author Bobbie Houston and what she’s about. It’s the whole idea of women celebrating each other’s wins and journeying through life together.
I don’t doubt that God can bring good out of tragedies, but the Bible is clear that God is not the author of evil!
‘Lonesome Dove’ by Larry McMurtry and ‘The Poisonwood Bible’ by Barbara Kingsolver have stuck with me throughout my life, and I think that says a lot about an author’s writing.
No one person is the author of a Bourne film. The truth is it’s a coalition of people who share the same vision for Bourne and his world, and we… its remarkably collaborative and collective.
The dwarfed trees of the Chinese and Japanese have been noticed by every author who has written upon these countries, and all have attempted to give some description of the method by which the effect is produced.
What inspired me to become an author? I think it was the snow in New York. I looked out the window and I said, ‘Well, I have to get dressed every morning to go to teach, but if I write a book, I can stay home in my bathrobe, eat candy corn.’
The secret to being a writer is that you have to write. It’s not enough to think about writing or to study literature or plan a future life as an author. You really have to lock yourself away, alone, and get to work.
Someone putting down $25 of his or her hard-earned money to buy my product, then doing it again because they felt the payoff was worth it. That’s as good as it gets for an author.
I don’t tend to be a nitpicker when I’m watching movies, so as long as something is true to the spirit of the original, that’s very much what we got for. You try to never do something that the original author wouldn’t have done themselves.
For a lot of people, becoming an author is a change in occupation… they are coming from something that totally has nothing to do with this. If they are expecting to come into a room full of people praising them, then they are in the wrong place.
My first novel, ‘The Lions of Lucerne,’ just poured out of me. It was an amazing feeling of accomplishment. My biggest fear and therefore my biggest obstacle to becoming an author had been, ‘What if I spend all that time and the book is no good?’
It’s easier to come up with new stories than it is to finish the ones you already have. I think every author would feel that way.
Every author believes that the book which he is placing before the public will ‘fill a long-felt want,’ and success or failure depends very much on how closely he has been able to gauge the nature of the ‘long-felt want.’
When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.
Be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.
The bestseller charts, a sure indicator of public taste, tell us with relentless frequency that Marian Keyes or Jeffrey Archer is a better author, by some dizzying six-figure sum, both in numbers of copies and money, than, say, J. M. Coetzee or Patrick White. Are they right?
I never admit to wishing I’d written something by another author, but if my name mysteriously appeared on the title page of ‘The Guns of August,’ I wouldn’t complain.
The terms of copyright last far too long: either the life of the author plus 70 years after death for a personal work or 95 years for a corporate work. That length doesn’t encourage more authorship – it merely limits the speakers who could share powerful speeches, books, and films.
There’s no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don’t know any author who’d try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.
I think authors like me are always struggling with the idea that they should have a brand and a Facebook author page and they should get Twitter accounts. I don’t know what to do with them.
If you were placing bets on which author would write the tenderest, most moving book about fatherhood, Philip Roth would probably come in at the bottom of the list.
There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.
If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.
I’m not an author, but as a songwriter, I’m afforded this kind of luxurious ambiguity in songs of being able to confess the secrets of my relationships with people and face basically no consequences, or ask for no approval or permission.
Sometime around 2006, I decided I had missed my true calling as a young adult author.
Personally I estimate about a third of my time is spent on author events, social media and traditional publicity.
