Author Quotations

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.

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.

Fiction is often most powerful when the author is exploring an issue - and not writing like a know-it-all who has the perfect answer.

I am astonished, when I pause to think about it, to discover myself to be an author of humorous novels for children. Or an author at all. I had a childhood much like everyone else's. What went wrong?

Each author has his or her own voice. I read each book slowly so I can see the patterns they use to spread out the garden of earthly delights.

I first encountered Bradbury's writing when I was pretty young. He's a great bridge author between young-adult fiction and literature.

A nonfiction author has to bring a platform with him - radio, a TV show or some kind of recognizable vehicle to help launch them. And the agent is really necessary to represent all of the business interests of the author.

A key goal for an author of history is to persuade his or her readers to forget what they know and to relive the world as it unfolded for characters of the time - with outcomes uncertain.

The author of the Gospel of Judas wasn't against martyrdom, and he didn't ever insult the martyrs. He said it's one thing to die for God if you have to do that. But it's another thing to say that's what God wants, that this is a glorification of God.

I like acting, alright, and it can be fun sometimes, but the process of it, of not being - not being the author of your own life, I can't take that anymore.

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.'

What I find cool about being a banned author is this: I'm writing books that evoke a reaction, books that, if dropped in a lake, go down not with a whimper but a splash.

A funny thing about near-future stories: the future catches up to them. If the author is unlucky, the future catches up faster than the book can get out the door.

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.

I'm obsessive. That's the word for me. I obsess - perhaps to the point where it's moderately dysfunctional. I tend to put a book through about 100 revisions. If anything, that's an understatement. If there's another author out there who does this sort of revision, I would really like to meet him. Maybe we could form some sort of support group.

Why should any man have power over any other man's faith, seeing Christ Himself is the author of it?

The only real mystery in the stories of political plagiarism is its durability in an age of Turnitin and other scanning software that can protect an author from his own mistakes, intentional or otherwise.

What SF author or fan isn't interested in human space travel? I've yet to meet one.

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.

In open-source in general, the power lies in connecting the author of the software directly to users, eliminating the middleman.

The prime goal of an author is the same as a musician, which is to emotionally connect with the reader in some way or another.

The few words of a title are the hardest words for any author to come up with.

Having spent the greater part of my life under a Communist dictatorship, I am very familiar with the Bolshevik mentality according to which an author in general, and an eminent author in particular, is always guilty, and must be punished accordingly.

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 used to say, read as much as you can. Now I say, read the best that you can, the stories that resonate with you, the books that are important to you. Try to read, not only as a reader, but also as a writer, to deconstruct how the author is telling his or her story.

If I ever stop acting, I'd like to be the author of that decision.

I've dealt with depression my entire life, on and off, which makes me the perfect author for teenage readers.

My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.

I'm a computer scientist by training. I'm also the author of three books, all of which endorse the use of biotechnology to improve the human condition. In the most recent of these, 'The Infinite Resource,' I talk about the power of innovation to save the world.

I come from a working-class family. They're the people I know and the people I love, I guess. I do not write about them for political reasons, but because, as I see it, most interesting things - social, political, emotional - take place there. It's a bottomless well for an author like me.

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 wrote 'Mr. In-Between' very quickly when I was about 23. I wrote the penultimate chapter, then realised I'd done something which was written to the best of my abilities. I panicked. I hesitated to finish the final chapter and went into withdrawal for three years. I decided to pick it up again after I went drinking with author Tim Binding.

Being an author is fun. It's a great job, because I can stay up as late as I want, and if I feel like taking the day off, I do it. Plus, I get to make up silly stories and draw pictures all day.

It seems appropriate that the author of '1984' was a British citizen. George Orwell must have seen how easily the great British public's lamb-like disposition toward its leaders could be exploited to create a police state.

I was a latecomer to romance, although I did read gothics. My father used to work for the 'Fort Worth Star-Telegram,' and their book reviewer, author Leonard Sanders, would pass on the gothics for my dad to give to me since Leonard didn't review gothics. I gobbled up books by Mary Stewart, Madeleine Brent, Victoria Holt and Phyllis Whitney.

What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.

I never dreamt I could be an author when I grew up. It just didn't occur to me, because I thought you had to be a) academic, so go to university, things like that, and I didn't think I was clever, or b) dead because I just assumed all the authors in the library were dead.

According to my parents, I was supposed to have been a nice, churchgoing Swiss housewife. Instead I ended up an opinionated psychiatrist, author and lecturer in the American Southwest, who communicates with spirits from a world that I believe is far more loving and glorious than our own.

As a writer, it's important to stay true to your story without giving a hoot about publishers, critics and readers. You should do your karma as an author the way you want to, and rest is up to God.

Point-of-view is a matter that readers rarely pay attention to, yet it's one of the most important story decisions an author makes.

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.

It's hard because people often don't recognise shyness; they think it's just someone being rude. I have had to work to overcome that, especially if I'm meeting my readers at author events, because I don't want them to think I'm snooty or rude.

There's always a slight tension when you sell a book to Hollywood, especially a nonfiction book. The author wants his story told intact; the nonfiction author wants it told accurately.

What an author likes to write most is his signature on the back of a cheque.

Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.

Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the 'Queen of Everything,' I thought it was a book for adults.

There is no way that the Fourth Gospel was written by John Zebedee or by any of the disciples of Jesus. The author of this book is not a single individual, but is at least three different writers/editors, who did their layered work over a period of 25 to 30 years.

When an author creates a town in her novels, she spends a great deal of time visualizing the streets and buildings, landmarks and topography. And while the town becomes real in her imagination, it's rare for an author to see the place she's created actually spring to life.

I'm a novelist - not an expert on coal mining. I'm not a politician with an agenda to push. I'm not a reporter presenting facts, and I'm not a sociologist documenting the last struggling remnants of blue-collar America. I'm simply an author who sets her books in coal country because it's where I come from, and it's what I know.

As a girl, I sat awestruck at the feet of Harriet Ne, author of 'Tales of Molokai'. It was she who used to say, 'I myself have seen it,' after telling a particularly hair-raising ghost story - a phrase that I borrowed for one of my titles.

All nonmimetic fiction is a balancing act between 'reality' and the obviously unreal, with no attempt by the author to make the latter seem like the former. Sometimes it's not an easy tightrope to walk. But when it succeeds, such fiction can brilliantly illuminate the human condition.

When I was growing up, my idea of a writer was someone like Sven Hassel, that mysterious Danish author who wrote thrillers about men clambering over walls and getting tangled in barbed wire.

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.

I've discovered as an author that the process of writing a novel becomes harder over time, not easier. I used to think the reverse must be true, that it would be like any task, and the more I practiced, the more adept I'd become.

All writers, in all viewpoints, must choose which information and scenes will be presented, and in which order. In that sense, the author is always represented as a point of view in a work of fiction. His hand can always be detected by the discerning.

It's weird being an author because it's different than writing songs. You put so much more of yourself out there to be judged because it's a memoir. So when the reviews come in, they all feel really personal. Some people are just going to hate you no matter what. Personally, I never believe good reviews.

It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.

The world of fiction is a sovereign world that comes to life in the author's head and follows the rules of art, of literature. And that is the major difference that is reflected in the form of the work, in its language and its plot. An author invents every aspect of a fiction, every detail.

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?'

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.

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.

Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, despite living through the 1917 February Revolution, forced exile amidst the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, the two World Wars and quite a lot of controversy, was an author who never gave up.

Stories where the author has known very little, but run a computer program that tells him how to construct a planet, and looked up specific things about rocketry and so on, really suck.

When it comes to the form the narrative will take, whether first person, third person, or Aunt Grace's cat, I usually find that the story tells me which voice it prefers, and that often changes as I go along. And in the end it really doesn't matter as long as the author can rig those voices all in harness to pull the same load.

I think it's fascinating to look at a world that an author has created that has sort of stemmed from the world now, and usually dystopian books point out something about our current world and exaggerates a tendency or a belief.

Personally I estimate about a third of my time is spent on author events, social media and traditional publicity.

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.

Readers always seem to think that the author has some control over the design of their books.

Anita Shreve is an author I adore. I rip through her meaty books and get off on the robust romance immensely - especially if I am feeling less than robust in my real life.

One of the things my success as an author has forced me to face is how dysfunctional... Maybe that's a strong word, but how obsessive I am.

I have always wondered why the movie industry was so firmly persuaded that the original author could be of no possible help in the case of a remake or any other change in a work.

No one really knows the value of book tours. Whether or not they're good ideas, or if they improve book sales. I happen to think the author is the last person you'd want to talk to about a book. They hate it by that point; they've already moved on to a new lover. Besides, the author never knows what the book is about anyway.

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.

I spent many years writing and directing in radio drama, so I am comfortable with an audience or a microphone, but I do worry about the blurring of an author's public persona with the work itself. A good 'performer' can make a mediocre book sound strong, and a shy author can leave listeners missing the excellence of his or her writing.

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.

I can't inhabit my characters until I know what kind of work they do. This requires research because my jobs for the last decade have been author and professor, and I'd like to spare the world more author or professor novels.

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

An author entices the readers with their words, and it is painful for them to even lose a sentence. But films and books are two different mediums and should be dealt differently. What works in a book might not work for a film. When I saw 'Anna Karenina' on screen, I didn't like it at all, whereas 'The Godfather' was legendary.

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.

A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.

No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.

You have plausible deniability, as they say in politics, as an author with movies. Because if the movie is terrible, you simply say they failed to catch the genius of the book.

I wrote books to entertain. I'm not trying to teach anything! If I suspected the author was trying to show me how to be a better behaved girl, I shut the book.

It is a wonderful thing in the process of writing when such paper characters are first sketched, and, when one is doing good work, from a certain point in time they come alive and start contradicting the author as well.

The book may be garbage, but if it weighs in at a kilo or more, I stand before its author in awe.

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 shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

Michael Lewis, author of 'Moneyball,' got special access for a profile of Obama for 'Vanity Fair' - but Obama insisted on redlining his quotes.

A number of American colleges are willing to pay a tempting amount to pinch and poke an author for a day or two.

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.

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'?

Here was buried Thomas Jefferson Author of the Declaration of American Independence Of the Statute of Virginia for religious freedom & Father of the University of Virginia.

We started talking about all the things in readings that don't work. We decided the people planning them don't think of the most important people involved - the author and the audience.

When you talk to an author - to any artist, really - you learn something about how they do what they do. I've never come away from that kind of experience feeling disillusioned, as if the magician had explained his tricks. I always find a greater appreciation for the form.

Vera Caspary wrote thrillers - but not like any other author of her time, male or female. Her specialty was a specific type that she pioneered - the psycho thriller.

The reality is, just like with adult books, a big name makes for an easier booking. Any time you're booking an author for a four-and-a-half to five-minute segment, if you're dealing with someone who's done television or comes with a track record, they are a known quantity. They know they have to have a funny or a touching story.

There is commerciality in storytelling, even in a film or a piece of literature. These things exist. That's why stories came to be: to hold attention and, while you're not looking, you'll get hopefully some nutritional value that the author has been working up. That's narrative; that's passing stuff down.

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.

Whenever you read a good book, it's like the author is right there, in the room talking to you, which is why I don't like to read good books.

'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.