These rough sketches, which are born in an instant in the heat of inspiration, express the idea of their author in a few strokes, while on the other hand too much effort and diligence sometimes saps the vitality and powers of those who never know when to leave off.
There’s a truth that comes through when an author performs his own work that is unique and special.
I have to warn you, I’m not just some sitcom guy. I’m now an author.
All novels must be autobiographical because I am the only material that I know. All of the characters are me. But at the same time, a novel is never autobiographical even if it describes the life of the author. Literary writing is a completely different medium.
Most people I know don’t even realize I’m an award-winning author, but I have gotten many opportunities to travel to places I’d never have visited otherwise.
I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.
The turning point was when I hit my 30th birthday. I thought, if really want to write, it’s time to start. I picked up the book How to Write a Novel in 90 Days. The author said to just write three pages a day, and I figured, I can do this. I never got past Page 3 of that book.
In open-source in general, the power lies in connecting the author of the software directly to users, eliminating the middleman.
What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
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 shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.
The more gifted and talkative one’s characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.
I believe that, like most writers, my personality comes through in the fiction. So in that respect my writing can’t be like any other author’s really.
Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I’m walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.
My favourite author as a child and teenager, and who I still re-read now, is K. M. Peyton. She writes very truthfully; sometimes I’m not sure if I’ve actually done things or just experienced them in her books.
But novels are never about what they are about; that is, there is always deeper, or more general, significance. The author may not be aware of this till she is pretty far along with it.
The idea is to become a best-selling author first and then the rest of my books will be slam dunks.
Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.
When you haven’t met someone, regardless of whether they’re an author or not, when you’re taking their work, and you are in some way filtering it or interpreting it, of course there’s potential for them to feel that you have, in some way, not lived up to what it could have been.
Readers will stay with an author, no matter what the variations in style and genre, as long as they get that sense of story, of character, of empathetic involvement.
I know that I am a singer and an actor, yet in order to give the public the impression that I am neither one nor the other, but the real man conceived by the author, I have to feel and to think as the man the author had in mind.
An author who sets about to depict events of the past that have run their course is suspected of wishing to avoid the problems of the present day, of being, in other words, a reactionary.
If I like a book, I tend to read the author’s entire collection. But I choose mainly through personal recommendations, general word of mouth and book reviews.
It makes me nuts, the idea that if you put a political struggle at the heart of your book, then it has to be that the author – me – is trying in some way to push my views onto my readers.
I’ve lost both parents in the last two years, so you pick up on that stuff. 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.
An author’s characters do what he wants them to do.
I fought as an infantry Marine on one of the Vietnam War’s harshest battlefields. After leaving the Marine Corps, I studied law and found a fulfilling career as an author and journalist. But again and again, I came back to the personal fulfillment that can only come from public service.
I am the freest author in the world.
To write what is worth publishing, to find honest people to publish it, and get sensible people to read it, are the three great difficulties in being an author.
John Austin, author of ‘Cubicle Warfare,’ has outdone himself with ‘Mini Weapons of Mass Destruction,’ a fully illustrated step-by-step guide to constructing thirty-five pocket-sized war machines, including a Clothespin Shooter, a Hanger Slingshot, a Paper-Clip Trebuchet, and Shoelace Darts.
My e-books sales have overtaken everything else, so I think all the marketing has become very much driven by the author now because of social media.
Ten years ago, you wrote a book and you never expected to find out anything about the author. Now with social media, everyone wants that connection. I think our readers want to be invited into our lives and brought on the journey and be part of this whole process.
I wanted to be an author for as long as I can remember.
Why there is one body in our System qualified to give light and heat to all the rest, I know no reason but because the Author of the System thought it convenient; and why there is but one body of this kind, I know no reason, but because one was sufficient to warm and enlighten all the rest.
Nobody wants to read a 600 page book in which the author is fabulous throughout.
The problem is that in order to publish a book in mainland China, you have to agree to be subject to censorship. That’s the nature of the system. I don’t challenge that system on its face. It’s their system. But as an author, I have a choice to make whether I’ll participate or I won’t.
When we read, we are doing more than delectating words on a page stories, characters, images, notions. We are communing with the mind of the author.
A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.
I shall be but a shrimp of an author.
Writing is probably the least glamorous profession there is. This doesn’t change when you become an author.
My name is Matthew Walker, I am a professor of neuroscience and psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and I am the author of the book ‘Why We Sleep.’
A novel is a conversation starter, and if the author isn’t there for the after-party, both the writer and the reader are missing a lot.
