Author Quotes
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An author departs, he does not die.
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In the theatre, the actor is in total control. The director wasn't in the house last night, the designer wasn't there, the author's dead. It's just us and the audience.
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William Trevor is an author I admire; his stories are subtle and powerful, and beautifully written.
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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.
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I am an author-illustrator of children's books - and yet - I must confess I don't do the books for the kids. When I'm working on a book I'm somewhere else - at the circus - or a rustic old farm - or deep in a forest - with no thought of who might read the book or what age group it would appeal to. I write them so I can illustrate them.
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Why couldn't the world that concerns us- be a fiction? And if somebody asked, 'but to be a fiction there surely belongs an author?'- couldn't one answer simply: 'Why? Doesn't this "belongs" perhaps belong to the fiction, too?'
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I've dealt with depression my entire life, on and off, which makes me the perfect author for teenage readers.
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When you're an author, you're always two people. Jasper the writer is different from Jasper the person at home.
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An actor's job is about putting across the author's intention; I don't think of myself on the same level as a creator.
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The bottom line is that this author, a practicing neurologist dealing with Alzheimer's disease on a daily basis, believes we need to expand the public awareness that modifiable lifestyle factors have a profound role to play in determining who will or won't get this disease.
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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.
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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.
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Psmith is the only thing in my literary career which was handed to me on a plate with watercress round it, thus enabling me to avoid the blood, sweat and tears inseparable from an author's life.
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This to me is the secret comedy of all author interviews, down through the ages, even the good ones in the 'Paris Review' and places. They're all acting. It's like watching a person in a play.
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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.
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I always wanted to be a children's author, and I have a really big library of children's books. All the ones from when I was little, they are just so beautiful. I read kids' books, and they calm me down.
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An author who gives a manager or publisher any rights in his work except those immediately and specifically required for its publication or performance is for business purposes an imbecile.
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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.'
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At his heart, Shakespeare was a YA author. So many of his plays are set with high school-aged characters. He understood the passion, the confusion and drama that marks that life stage.
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Many of the characters who appear in the pages of the Fourth Gospel are literary creations of its author and were never intended to be understood as real people, who actually lived in history.
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I don't think the author should make the reader do that much work to remember who somebody is.
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I wrote a novel, Ghost Road Rules, and as soon as it was done and polished, I began reaching out to agents. I ignored the frequent advice to 'shoot low and try for a low-level agent because they're the only ones that will take a flyer on a new author.' That sounded like bad advice to me.
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In terms of style, I think the memoirist should have a novelist's skill and all the elements of a novelist's toolbox. When I read a memoir, I want to really, deeply experience what the author experienced. I want to see the characters and hear the way they speak and understand how they think. And so in that way, writing a memoir feels similar to writing a novel.
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I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors. If they have something to say, they will sooner or later find readers; if not, they won’t. There are plenty of examples. I very much love those mysterious volumes, both ancient and modern, that have no definite author but have had and continue to have an intense life of their own. They seem to me a sort of nighttime miracle, like the gifts of the Befana, which I waited for as a child. I went to bed in great excitement and in the morning I woke up and the gifts were there, but no one had seen the Befana. True miracles are the ones whose makers will never be known; they are the very small miracles of the secret spirits of the home or the great miracles that leave us truly astonished. I still have this childish wish for marvels, large or small, I still believe in them.
