Quotes About Authors

The biggest critics of my books are people who never read them.

Like many writers, I'm usually more interested in reading about authors than their actual works. We're more curious to know how they were written than what they are like to read.

In the early '70s - a very good time for children's books and their authors - editors and publishers were willing to take a chance on a new writer. They were willing and able to invest their time in nurturing writers with promise, encouraging them.

Publishers like their authors to take advantage of publicity opportunities.

I like science fiction. Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick and Vonnegut, and I really like Margaret Atwood, 'The Handmaid's Tale.' And you know, so much of science fiction has to do with predicting what's to come, so I think that's really interesting.

I have no illusions concerning the precarious status of my tales and do not expect to become a serious competitor of my favorite weird authors.

The talk shows in the States want celebrities, not authors. In France, it is different; writers are called upon to comment on everything. They have a very public role there.

Regarding those pesky impersonal third-person singular pronouns and other occasions when the authors must assign a gender to a fictitious person used to illustrate a point, it seems to us there is a simple, fair solution, which we hereby endorse: Unless there are obvious reasons not to, use the gender of the first author. We use he throughout.

Who is more real? Homer or Ulysses? Shakespeare or Hamlet? Burroughs or Tarzan?

I would give them (aspiring writers) the oldest advice in the craft: Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You've heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.

To refer even in passing to unpublished or struggling authors and their problems is to put oneself at some risk, so I will say here and now that any unsolicited manuscripts or typescripts sent to me will be destroyed unread. You must make your way yourself. Why you should be so set on the nearly always disappointing profession is a puzzling question.

John D. MacDonald is by any standards a better writer than Saul Bellow, only MacDonald writes thrillers and Bellow is a human-heart chap, so guess who wears the top-grade laurels?

Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.

We're currently living with a generation of established novelists who are embarrassingly out of date with respect to social networking, internet skills, and so on.

I think almost every writer in the world would hope that books would be always talked about with respect and civility and depth and seriousness.

One of my ambitions has been to go back to what those great authors were doing then ... to bridge that sensibility of old Victorian Gothic tales and reconstruct them in a modern way.

British literary landscape,

Donegan Bane and Gracious O'Callahan - the Monster Hunters. Adventurers, inventors, authors of Monster Hunting for Beginners and it's sequels, Monster Hunting for Beginners is Probably Inadvisable and Seriously, Dude, Stop Monster Hunting.

We're authors, too," Donegan said, "and we've been trying to get into the picture-book market. We have this idea for a Where's Wally type thing, except in ours, you'd have to find the one living person hiding in among all the dismembered corpses while the chainsaw-wielding killer hunts him down. You know, for kids." "We're going to call is Save the Survivor," Gracious said.

Critics are to authors what dogs are to lamp-posts.

Over my desk, I've got this enormous bulletin board, and on it I've tacked black-and-white photographs of writers at work.

It's heartbreaking when you love a book that fails. And it always seems to happen to the nicest authors.

Great authors are admirable in this respect: in every generation they make for disagreement. Through them we become aware of our differences.

Montalbano sat outside reading a good detective novel by two Swedish authors, husband and wife, in which there wasn't a page without a ferocious and justified attack on social democracy and the government. In his mind, Montalbano dedicated the book to all those who did not deign to read mystery novels because, in their opinion, they were only entertaining puzzles.