Author Quotes
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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.
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I know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.
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The humor section is the last place an author wants to be. They put your stuff next to collections of Cathy cartoons.
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Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.
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An author ought to write for the youth of his own generation, the critics of the next, and the schoolmaster of ever afterwards.
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Oftentimes when you see adaptations of books you like, you're let down. As an author, you assume that they are going to suck. A little bit of hope is dangerous.
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In a sense, one can never read the book that the author originally wrote, and one can never read the same book twice.
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I see genres as generating sets of rules or conventions that are only interesting when they are subverted or used to disguise the author's intent. My own way of doing this is to attempt a sort of whimsical alchemy, whereby seemingly incompatible genres are brought into unlikely partnerships.
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Blogs are easy to start, but unless the author is famous, it takes years to build a following.
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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.
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The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
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It is conceivable that what is unified form to the author or composer may of necessity be formless to his audience.
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What makes a book great, a so-called classic, it its quality of always being modern, of its author, though he be long dead, continuing to speak to each new generation.
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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.
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It is difficult to survive as an author in Sweden, so for commercial success, it is good idea to write crime, get yourself translated, and live happily ever after.
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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.
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As an author, you're really grateful for the people who are supporting you, but on some other level, that can be a dangerous echo chamber.
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Buy other authors' books when you go to their events. Even if you aren't going to read it. Even if you are going to give it away. Even if you aren't interested. Not just for the author but for the bookstore. It's karma and just plain good manners.
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I didn't want to be an author; I wanted to be a scientist. Not that I didn't love literature, but I couldn't distinguish it from reading, and reading was already my default activity, almost like breathing.
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As an author, I had spent years writing my stories on my own in a quiet room. My ideas traveled from my brain to my fingers, executed exactly as I saw fit, never veering from my own intent. TV simply doesn't work that way.
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I've found that the most engaging and satisfying author events I've done are with other people, where the conversation is spontaneous. I think that is by far the better way to introduce and promote a book.
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After all, it is style alone by which posterity will judge of a great work, for an author can have nothing truly his own but his style.
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An author frequently chooses solemn or overwhelming subjects to write about; he is so impressed at writing about Life and Death that he does not notice that he is saying nothing of the slightest importance about either.
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The listeners who buy books after a reading multiply that reading; the author who realizes that he or she may be writing on a blank page but is at least not speaking to a blank wall may be encouraged by the experience, and write more.
