Quotes About Authors

I don't ask writers about their work habits. I really don't care.

In TIME June 7, 2010 On the sustainability of the publishing industry, in the Chicago Tribune: I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea. We live in a literate time, and our children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numbers.... The future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $175. - 5/26/10

Interestingly, relatively few of my correspondents were of the variety familiar to most authors, the users of block capitals and red ink.

People see a Macbeth film. They imagine they have seen Macbeth, and don't want to see it again; so when your Mr. Hackett or somebody comes round to act the play, he finds the house empty. That is what has happened to dozens of good plays whose authors have allowed them to be filmed. It shall not happen to mine if I can help it.

I wonder what book signings will be like when most of the books we read are electronic. Will authors sign something else? A flyer, perhaps? A special kind of card devised for the purpose?

Truth is, I love all the horror guys and girls: Gord Rollo, Shirley Jackson, Harlan Ellison, Ramsey Campbell, Dan Simmons, Thomas Ligotti. Each one of them brings something wonderfully different and, because I love the genre, I love those who love the genre, too. And I hope the genre ends up loving me back.

Authors don't tend to stay with the same agents and editors over their entire lifetimes, but Grafton worked with Marian Wood, her editor at Putnam, from Kinsey's first outing, and signed with Molly Friedrich, still her literary agent, with the publication of 'B Is for Burglar.'

Most novels put out by small or corporate presses don't really sell that well - usually a thousand copies or so. Working with a small press, you have to be willing to book reading tours, plan events, make contacts with other small press authors, and find new ways of getting word about your new work out there.

As an arts journalist in London, working mainly for the BBC, I interviewed hundreds if not thousands of authors. From them I gleaned a great deal of passing instruction in writing and I observed one fascinating detail: no two writers approach their work - physically - in the same way.

The study of literature threatens to become a kind of paleontology of failure, and criticism a supercilious psychoanalysis of authors.

I don't find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it's a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together.

In India, we don't read thrillers; we read authors.

My preferred genre of reading is crime thrillers - books by Harlan Coben, Jo Nesbo, David Baldacci, James Patterson, Ashwin Sanghi and a few others - and I write crime thrillers.

The thing about literature is that, yes, there are kind of tides of fashion, you know; people come in and out of fashion; writers who are very celebrated fall into, you know, people you know stop reading them, and then it comes back again.

When my French side thinks of 'bohemian,' it imagines Montparnasse authors and absinthe - that kind of aesthetic. The American definition might be more tied to American history and culture.

Of the innumerable authors whose performances are thus treasured up in magnificent obscurity (in a library), most are forgotten, because they never deserved to be remembered.

Grubstreet—The name of a street near Moorsfield, London, much inhabited by writers of small histories, dictionaries, and temporary poems.

Authors and lovers always suffer some infatuation, from which only absence can set them free.

The history of science fiction tends to be the history of its editors.

Thomas B. Costain, Herman Wouk, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Kenneth Roberts, Edna Ferber, Sholem Asch, Ben Ames Williams, Frederic Wakeman, Frances Parkinson Keyes, Irwin Shaw, Budd Schulberg, Hamilton Basso, and, of course, Samuel Shellabarger.

Writing the same kind of material is no guarantee you'll be working from the same ethos so that writers from different fields are just as likely to have an understanding of each other's work as someone working in the same genre.

Those who say they would write a book if only they had time will never become authors.

I found myself jealous of the people who wrote the books. They were dead and they were still taking up my time. Who did they think they were?

Time is of no account with great thoughts, which are as fresh to -day as when they first passed through their authors' minds ages ago.