I’m a single parent, a working mother, an executive, and an author. My greatest accomplishment will be to raise three wonderful children.
For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.
I want to be a lawyer, a dancer, an actress, a mother, a wife, a children’s author, a distance runner, a poet, a pianist, a pet store owner, an astronaut, an environmental and humanitarian activist, a psychiatrist, a ballet teacher, and the first woman president.
Bad reviews are the bane of an author’s post-publication existence.
If the book is a mystery to its author as she’s writing, inevitably it’s going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.
I’ve got lots of favourite authors, but I would say Nicci French because I look more forward to reading her next new book than any other author.
It’s very hard to get one publisher to accept an author going over to the other author’s company to collaborate.
There can be no better grounding for a lifetime as an author than to see humanity in all its various guises through the lens of the reporter for the town.
Right now, my career is in three directions: as a performer, as an arranger, as an author – and I don’t give any one of them true precedent, or true top marks, as opposed to the other two.
There’s this creative thing in me that wants to have my work used – like the author of a book who wants it read.
I decided to become an author when my grandmother taught me to write, when I was six. I can still recall the sensation of being able to turn words into stories. It was a miracle.
I took up a sort of a hobby of just hanging around the local library. I’d pick out an author and I would read all their books.
For an author, the nice characters aren’t much fun. What you want are the screwed up characters. You know, the characters that are constantly wondering if what they are doing is the right thing, characters that are not only screwed up but are self-tapping screws. They’re doing it for themselves.
Children know when they are being sold a sanitised version of the world, and I think that’s a betrayal of the relationship between author and reader.
My #1 job as a thriller author is to give readers the best white-knuckle thrill ride I am capable of. I am first and foremost in the entertainment business. If that suspenseful ride is also terrifying because it hits really close to home, then I am once again doing what I am supposed to do as a thriller author.
God keeps me grounded as well as my husband, Keith Douglas, who is such an inspiration to me. He’s an author, speaker, and businessman. He’s just a great husband and blessing.
One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.
I’ve never been a collector – just a consumer – and these days unless a book is signed to me by another author, I don’t normally have any qualms about passing it to a friend or donating it to the library.
What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.
It’s all run by one person, but, real talk, Brandon McCartney is a book author, the Based God is perfect and Lil B is the trendsetter, the person that everyone follows and pays attention to.
Why wouldn’t – how couldn’t – an author care about how his or her books look?
My job as an author is to tell the story in the best way possible, to make it flow seamlessly and get the reader to keep turning the page.
Part of the job of a children’s author is to write books that will be remembered, definitely, but if I might go out on a limb, I will say that the other part, the more important part, is to build books that will help children fall in love with reading. That, to me, is the real job.
I believe that it’s an author’s job to cast his imagination into the far spaces. Your life should – and I think it’s inescapable that it will – inform your work. I’m all for using anything that can make your art better, but your intuition should be an equal partner.
Who learns most from a good book is the author.
To be true to a play, you can’t add something that takes away from the author’s intent.
When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.
Anyone who wants simple, pat stories should buy another author’s product. The real universe ain’t that way, and neither are my fictive ones.
It appears a bold thing to say so when one sees how much many a modern author who knows how to make a skilful use of the Book of Chronicles has to tell about the tabernacle.
The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds – the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.
Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.
For me to be a billion-dollar author, I need to have people buying my books at Wal-Mart.
For the critic, the author does not exist; only a certain number of writings exist.
An SF author who reads only SF will have little new to contribute, but someone with a broader experience will bring more to the table.
I had wanted to be a writer for a very long time, but I had no talent for finishing books. I would start them, get about 20,000 words in, and come to a screeching halt, because I had no idea how to outline a story or what my own process as an author was.
I still pinch meself when I wake up of a morning. Who ever thought I’d be a children’s author – let alone a best-selling children’s author?
Like most of us, I’m used to juggling about 52 roles in life. Wife. Mother. Sister. Friend. Author. Sometimes I feel a bit ‘multiple-personality’.
Now, Venus is an extremely hostile environment, and as such presents a lot of challenges for a science fiction author who wants to create life there. However, as I began to research it more thoroughly, I found myself intrigued by the possibilities the world offers.
Writing is something I want to explore. If I were to do it, I would want it to be not a book made by a YouTuber; I would really want to respect that craft of literature and just be an author.
An author’s ability to bring a marketing synopsis to the table – along with a great manuscript – makes a difference in what books get picked up. This is true for both fiction and nonfiction titles. You need to show your publisher what you’ve got in your marketing arsenal.
I’m very comfortable with tweeting, I have a very active author Facebook page, I Skype book clubs all over the world.
English food writer Elizabeth David, cook and author Richard Olney and the owner of Domaine Tempier Lulu Peyraud have all really inspired the way I think about food.
Publishing is a business. It’s about squeezing every last dollar out of every available source, and the most vulnerable source is the author. No clearer proof of that exists than the ‘standard’ book contract.
Aleta St. James is an internationally renowned energy healer, life coach, best selling author, and more. Aleta does private sessions to release old resistance and shift out of anxiety, depression, low self-esteem, trauma, addictions, infertility, and insecurity at a cellular level.
If you’re too scared to put your dreams, thoughts, desires, fantasies on paper and share them with the world, then being an author isn’t the right career for you.
My favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.
Every author dreams of the kind of attention that ‘Beautiful Children’ has received in the press. Obviously, it’s a shock whenever it happens. So yeah, I’m as surprised as everybody else.
The language fictional characters use is chosen for effect, at least if the author is concentrating.
I’ve done a lot of Shakespeare onstage, and I’m not convinced that the Earl of Oxford was the author of all those works, but I am convinced that the Stratfordian William Shakespeare was not. My feeling is that it was an amalgamation of many writers, in the same way that most films are a collaborative endeavor.
At dramatic rehearsals, the only author that’s better than an absent one is a dead one.
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.
When you have an author and an auteur, it’s a difficult and challenging relationship.
A bad author can take the most moral issue and make you want to just never, ever think about that moral issue.
If Shakespeare had to go on an author tour to promote Romeo and Juliet, he never would have written Macbeth.
My childhood was a mix of ballet classes and debating society. I liked arguing. As a teenager, I wanted to be an author. Later on, inspired by Young Enterprise and the Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, I decided I wanted to go into business.
You can do whatever you want. If you want to be a singer, author, book writer, basketball player, you just have to put the time in.
