Craig Brown Quotes
The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible.
Quotes to Explore
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I developed a mania for Fitzgerald - by the time I'd graduated from high school I'd read everything he'd written. I started with 'The Great Gatsby' and moved on to 'Tender Is the Night,' which just swept me away. Then I read 'This Side of Paradise,' his novel about Princeton - I literally slept with that book under my pillow for two years.
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The problem with writing a monthly book is that you're going through your work like a man running for a bus, red-faced and out of breath. There isn't time for reflection or critical self-examination.
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There's something different that happens when you're writing a song for your own record that you know you're going to sing.
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I am an intelligent river which has reflected successively all the banks before which it has flowed by meditating only on the images offered by those changing shores.
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I don't worry too much about the script, I just ad lib, like Pearl Bailey.
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After 20 years, a million written words, and nine rejected novels, I finally landed a book contract.
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What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
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I enjoy it too much - even if I knew I'd never get a book published, I would still write. I enjoy the experience of getting thoughts and ideas and plots and characters organised into this narrative framework.
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When you're heartbroken, you're at your most creative - you have to channel all your energies into something else to not think about it. Contentment is a creativity killer, but don't worry - I'm very capable of making myself discontented.
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My father was in Congress when I was born. He was mayor my whole life from when I was in grade school - first grade - to when I went away to college.
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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.
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It's easier to release an ebook than a print book.
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I don't really know what the Great American Novel is. I like the idea that there could be one now, and I wouldn't object if someone thought it was mine, but I don't claim to have written that - I just wrote my book.
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Looking after a disabled child pushes you to the limits of what you can cope with... physically, emotionally. It's because there's this baby, this child that you love more than you can possibly imagine, in some way more than a normal child because you worry about them 24 hours a day. But at the same time you are so, so proud of them.
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I have two daughters: One an open book, one a locked box. So the question of privacy is a challenging one. How much do kids need? How much should we give? How do we prepare them to live in a world where the very notion of privacy opens a generational chasm?
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Butler's novel 'Kindred' may be the book most widely read by readers outside science fiction; it has been assigned as a text in classrooms and has sold steadily since its publication in 1979.
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You have to write the book that wants to be written. And if the book will be too difficult for grown-ups, then you write it for children.
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Book sales and teens reading is always a fantastic thing, but we should also be celebrating and consuming the huge wealth of U.K. and U.K.-based writing and illustrating talent. Authors such as Charlie Higson, Darren Shan, Holly Smale, Tanya Byrne, Catherine Johnson, Sophie Mckenzie, to name but a few.
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A well-composed book is a magic carpet on which we are wafted to a world that we cannot enter in any other way.
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If I can write a book that will help the world make a little more sense to a teen, then that's why I was put on the planet.
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Enlightened despots are mythical creatures; real despots seem more interested in stealing money or installing their sons after them.
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Every age has its massive moral blind spots. We might not see them, but our children will. Slavery was one of them and the people who best served that age were the ones who called it as it was - which was ungodly and inhuman. Ben Franklin called it what it was when he became president of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society.
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The best critics do not worry about what the author might think. That would be like a detective worrying about what a suspect might think. Instead, they treat the reader as an intelligent friend, and describe the book as honestly, and as entertainingly, as possible.
