The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
I’m a commercial writer, not an author. Margaret Mitchell was an author. She wrote one book.
The reason that fiction is more interesting than any other form of literature, to those who really like to study people, is that in fiction the author can really tell the truth without humiliating himself.
The writer marks the changes he wants to make, while a proofreader also goes through the galley, checking it page-by-page against the manuscript. Once all these changes are identified, a second-pass proof is made, and this, too, gets sent to the author and the proofreader, and the process begins anew.
My parents were horrified when I told them I wanted to be an author.
The author himself is the best judge of his own performance; none has so deeply meditated on the subject; none is so sincerely interested in the event.
British cookbook author Elizabeth David led the most adventurous life but is widely credited with bringing to the fore the importance of home cooking.
As an author, I’ve never forgotten how to daydream.
President Roosevelt, the author of Social Security, was the first to suggest that, in order to provide for the country’s retirement needs, Social Security would need to be supplemented by personal savings accounts.
I’m the author of several books, including children’s books.
My typical morning involves some time on the treadmill, but obviously I skip that a lot. Mostly, I wake up, check my email, then get to work on the various interviews and questions and phone calls that come with being an author.
I admit to subscribing to all the celebrity rags. The best part of being an author is if the celebs aren’t being ridiculous enough, you can just make it up.
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.
I didn’t understand in the beginning that the editor didn’t want me to know the author. I’d make an effort to meet the author, but it would end up being a disaster because then I had the author telling me what I should be doing.
Hey, over here! Have your picture taken with a reclusive author! Today only, we’ll throw in a free autograph! But wait, there’s more!
In the past I have declined to comment on my own work: because, it seems to me, a poem is what it is; because a poem is itself a definition, and to try to redefine it is to be apt to falsify it; and because the author is the person least able to consider his work objectively.
I get up in the morning. I usually do a radio interview early in the morning. I usually do a book signing, because I’m also a cookbook author, so I’m at some store, at a Walmart or a Williams Sonoma, for three hours, standing up, signing autographs, and taking pictures for three hours.
Unless one is planning to go shopping – basically begging to be smothered by the ravening throngs of returners and bargain hunters; an embrace as constricting as that hugging machine designed by autistic author Temple Grandin – then Boxing Day feels like a bar after last call when the lights have been turned up.
If your life were a book and you were the author, how would you want your story to go? That’s the question that changed my life forever.
Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship – it’s all one person speaking.
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author’s private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
The author, in his work, must be like God in the Universe, present everywhere and visible nowhere.
I don’t think about being famous, really. Being an author, I don’t generally get stopped as I walk down the street. It’s not like being a movie star.
Obviously it makes a difference if an author has a public online profile of some sort, even just down to the level of having a moderately popular blog. Most books sell 5, 10, or 15 thousand copies. Most are midlist books. With those people, even a modest online presence can make a difference in sales.
I like to read novels where the author seems knowledgeable, like someone you know you could walk calmly next to through a complicated situation, and he or she would be alive to its meaning and ironies. And you wouldn’t even have to mention them out loud to each other.
When a single author uploading his own books to Amazon can earn more money than a large N.Y. publisher exploiting both print and e-rights, there’s something amiss.
I can’t change overnight into a serious literary author. You can’t compare apples to oranges. William Faulkner was a great literary genius. I am not.
In the world of book writing, an author really gets to have control over what he or she writes, which is why it is very satisfying. With the help of a great compatible editor, you really have something in the end you can call your own.
Your source material is the people you know, not those you don’t know, but every character is an extension of the author’s own personality.
I’ve learned over the years that big-name writers might be treated fairly by the media conglomerates that dominate publishing today. But the average author isn’t.
With the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it’s much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
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.
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.
Unlike the stereotypical author, I’ve never had a job as a short-order cook, but I love cooking hot breakfasts for lots of people, juggling the eggs and the bacon and the tomatoes and the fried potatoes and so on.
When I do a workshop, there is always at least one author who comes up afterward and asks if I’ll take a look at his or her book and consider blurbing it. For some reason, I can turn someone down in e-mail, but when he or she is looking me in the eye, I cave.
I’ve been very lucky with prizes. But the thing about prizes is that, when you talk about a prize-winning author, you can be talking about one that is well-regarded but doesn’t sell any books.
Reading Edmund Morris’s ‘Colonel Roosevelt’ is a rewarding journey, as it must also have been for its author, who concludes his three-volume saga begun in 1980 with publication of ‘The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt.’
The audience may not have felt it was right, and the author may have felt a little upset, but every part I’ve played I’ve twisted around in my mind until I’ve made it into something of my own. Looking back over it, I didn’t deliberately sit down and plan like that, but it does read like it.
The difference is slight, to the influence of an author, whether he is read by 500 readers, or by five hundred thousand; if he can select the 500, he reaches the five hundred thousand.
Life is the most versatile thing under the sun; and in the pursuit of life and character the author who works in a groove works in blinkers.
We wanted to create an environment where if a game player enjoyed the ‘writing style’ of a particular game designer, he or she could look for the next game by that same author and not be disappointed.
I am an author, and like many in my profession, I am also a traveling salesman, going all over in an attempt to persuade people to spend twenty-five dollars on a hardcover book by me.
Reading literature remains a civilising activity, no matter that it’s literature in which people do and say abominable things and the author curses like the very devil. What’s at issue is how we describe the way the civilising works.
The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you’re just dropped into a different world.
I think it’s always good for the author to stay a good cattle prod’s distance from the actual moviemaking.
Find me a first novel that doesn’t have parallels with the author’s life.
Any book on empire will omit, by necessity, vast tracts of the imperial experience, and so critics can easily find facts and details to contradict an author’s bold generalisations.
My office walls are covered with autographs of famous writers – it’s what my children call my ‘dead author wall.’ I have signatures from Mark Twain, Earnest Hemingway, Jack London, Harriett Beecher Stowe, Pearl Buck, Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, to name a few.
Illustrations can be a big window: a looking glass into the author’s imagination.
Maybe other writers have perfect first drafts, but I am not one of them. I always try to get the book as tight as I can, but you reach a point as the author where you have lost all perspective.
Sometimes the reader will decide something else than the author’s intent; this is certainly true of attempts to empirically decipher reality.
When I was in fourth grade, a novelist came to talk to my English class. She told us that being an author meant sitting at the kitchen table in pajamas, drinking tea with the dogs at your feet.
