Author Quotes
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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.
Martin Amis
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There's no such thing as a perfect person, so it makes no sense to write a perfect person. I don't know any author who'd try. And we write characters, not representations of groups.
David Levithan
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Written language must be considered as a particular psychic reality. The book is permanent; it is an object in your field of vision. It speaks to you with a monotonous authority which even its author would not have. You are fairly obliged to read what is written.
Gaston Bachelard
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I was a big reader as a child. My father is a great book lover and a librarian, but he forbid me to read bad literature. I was not allowed to read Nancy Drew or books like that. I often say to him that me becoming a crime author is both a way of pleasing him and annoying him.
Asa Larsson
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Can an author with reason complain that he is cramped and shackled if he is not at liberty to publish blasphemy, bawdry, or sedition?; all of which are equally prohibited in the freest governments, if they are wise and well-regulated ones.
Bill Vaughan
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As an author, you need to keep talking to your audience to remind yourself what they like and what they don't like. You spend most of your life locked in a room, and you need to be social occasionally.
Jonathan Stroud
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You can get a subjective and highly factual dossier on most anyone in the public realm almost instantly. It's why publishers don't worry about author photos any more; people just Google a person and get on with things.
Douglas Coupland
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An actor must communicate his author's given message--comedy, tragedy, serio- comedy; then comes his unique moment, as he is confronted by the looked-for, yet at times unexpected, reaction of the audience. This split second is his; he is in command of his medium; the effect vanishes into thin air; but that moment has a power all its own and, like power in any form, is stimulating and alluring.
Eleanor Robson Belmont
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When I was a young artist, I liked and was interested in belonging to the mainstream comics group. I didn't introduce myself as an author, but only as a designer.
David Mazzucchelli
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When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
Lucius Annaeus Seneca
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If the day gets really bad, I can always pull out fan mail. Who else gets mail where kids write to you and say, 'Dear Mr. Scieszka, we were supposed to write to our favorite author, but Roald Dahl is dead. So I'm writing to you.'
Jon Scieszka
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I come from a theater background, so I always like to dissect the scene and try to get some hint about what the author was trying to get at. I still look up the meaning of the name of the character to see if there are any clues in that.
Adina Porter
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I worked in publishing before I became an author, so I knew how a book gets made.
Lauren Oliver
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When an editor works with an author, she cannot help seeing into the medicine cabinet of his soul. All the terrible emotions, the desire for vindications, the paranoia, and the projection are bottled in there, along with all the excesses of envy, desire for revenge, all the hypochondriacal responses, rituals, defenses, and the twin obsessions with sex and money. It other words, the stuff of great books.
Betsy Lerner
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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.
Jim Crace
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One of the biggest turnoffs is being presented with an idea that's already, to a degree, complete. That's not an adventure, and it's not a learning experience. It's more of a chore. Then you become a technician with taste, as opposed to an explorer and an author.
Bennett Miller
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My go-to author for knowing it all is Evelyn Waugh. 'A Handful of Dust' is as perfect as a book can get.
Laurie Graham
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It can certainly happen that characters in more sophisticated stories can 'take over' as they develop and change the author's original ideas. Well, it certainly happens to me at times.
Margaret Mahy
