Quotes About Authors

There's a weird historical link between cults and science fiction. Not only do science-fiction writers create cults, sometimes cult leaders become obsessed with science fiction.

The stranglehold of the departed was much resented by the new generation of aspiring authors. Which is why it is who did make the breakthrough were so admired.

Po tym poznaje si? wielkich pisarzy, ?e wchodz? w twoj? pami?? bez ?ladu, jak cienka ig?a, ale ju? nigdy si? od nich nie uwolnisz.

People talk about mainstream fiction and sf as though they were two quite different kinds of writing, and fantasy as well, as though it was quite different. But I think this a false distinction, that it is a labelling that helps librarians, and people who know the kind of thing they like and don't want their prejudices to be disturbed.

Obviously, there are those in the industry who don't give romance novels the level of respect the sales would warrant. They'll talk about a book that sells maybe 100,000 copies, that happens to be very literary, whereas something like 'Crossfire' will sell 13 million copies in a single language and hardly get any mentions at all.

I really like Pat Parker. I really like Audre Lorde. I read a lot of the Beats when I was younger, so Diane di Prima, Gary Snyder. I've been discovering a lot more modern poems as well.

Some of the most common pitfalls I see occur when authors don't check their privilege. Billions are living in a personal apocalypse right this second, so a little research and empathy can go a long way toward developing a convincing world.

I've been religiously reading the O. Henry Prize anthologies every year since college, when I first began trying to write stories. Many of the authors whose work I cherish the most were people I first learned about through The O. Henry Prize Stories - and then I'd go search for their books.

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.

The praise of ancient authors proceeds not from the reverence of the dead, but from the competition and mutual envy of the living.

I came to feel that, in addition to Imre Kertesz, Hungary has produced at least three contemporary novelists who deserve the Nobel: Peter Nadas, Peter Esterhazy and Laszlo Krasznahorkai.

All writers have a love-hate relationship with writing. Performing is fun, too, but I wouldn't say it's my favorite. But the most fulfilling is producing.

The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule.

As I got into my teens, I started reading better books, beginning with the Beats and then the hippie writers, people like Wallace Stegner up in Northern California, and all the political New Journalism stuff, the Boys on the Bus dudes and Ken Kesey.

read to each other from novels by George Eliot and Dickens and Hardy and Tolstoy during my elementary school years. My brother Bill (now a professor of English)

The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them. We need readers. More readers. Fewer writers.

but we don't know whether the killer writes." "Oh, nearly everyone does these days," said Fancourt. "The whole world's writing novels, but nobody's reading them.

all texts are at least potentially environmental (and therefore susceptible to ecocriticism or ecologically informed reading) in the sense that all text are literally or imaginatively situated in a place, and in the sense that their authors, consciously or not, inscribe within them a certain relation to their place.

If I had my way books would not be written in English but in an exceedingly difficult secret language.... This plan would have the advantage of scaring off all amateur authors, retired politicians, country doctors...who would not have the patience to learn the secret language.

if the gospels had been identical to each other, word for word, this would have raised charges that the authors had conspired among themselves to coordinate their stories in advance, and that would have cast doubt on them.

Let us remember that the authors of the Federalist Papers were still under a compulsion to prove that it is possible for a large society to be republican or free. Let us also remember that the authors of the Federalist Papers signed themselves "Publius": republicanism points back to classical antiquity and therefore also to classical political philosophy.

The Second Testament authors used the same First Testament texts independently of one another. And they interpreted them in exactly the same way, often citing the texts in the same order.

For those who are afflicted with book lust, those for whom reading is more than information or escape, the road to our passion is quite simple, paved merely by the presence of the printed matter. It's a common story; fill in your own blanks: I was -- years old when I happened on a novel called --, and within six months I had read every other book by the writer known as --.

Writers are also sort of like vultures, but with fewer ethics.