Quotes About Authors

It's always a mistake for writers to key their submissions to world events, because they move so quickly and unpredictably, as has certainly proven the case in Afghanistan.

If writers learn more from their books than do readers, perhaps I may have begun to learn.

I think new writers everywhere need opportunities to get published.

And, of course, some SF is set close enough to here and now that Anglo and European do apply. Since many of the writers come from those backgrounds, so does much of the fiction.

In 1986 we were trying to help women get in print, stay in print, and come to the attention of booksellers and libraries. At that time, books by men mystery writers were reviewed seven times as often as books by women.

Writers of fiction, when they begin, are more likely to try the short form.

Movies have influenced all writers, not just thriller writers.

I can't stand Anne Tyler books, but I gobble them up. It's like Updike - I can't stand him either, but I read everything he writes.

I'll read anything Anne Carson writes, anything J. M. Coetzee writes, and anything Cormac McCarthy writes. I'll drop whatever I'm doing to read a new Mary Ruefle essay.

In Hollywood the woods are full of people that learned to write but evidently can't read. If they could read their stuff, they'd stop writing.

There's no lack of writers writing novels in America, about America. Therefore, it seems to me it would be wasteful for me to add to that huge number of people writing here when there are so few people writing about somewhere else.

Writing about Africa by Africans has been part of my literary apprenticeship, standing alongside works by authors such as Joseph Conrad, Joyce Cary and Graham Greene as influences.

In his earliest youth, he had drawn inspiration from really bad authors, as you may have seen from his style; as he grew older, he lost his taste for them, but the excellent authors just didn't fill him with the same enthusiasm

Les vraies femmes de lettres sont des phénomènes. Leur rareté fait leur prix.

Whitman, for example, self-published (and typeset!) Leaves of Grass. Self-publishing could change from stigma to bragging point—maybe we could change the term to "artisanal publishing" and foster the image of authors lovingly crafting their books with total control over the process.

Popular authors do not and apparently cannot appreciate the fact that true art is obtainable only by rejecting normality and conventionality in toto, and approaching a theme purged utterly of any usual or preconceived point of view.

Fundamental and flagrant contradictions rarely occur in second-rate writers; in the work of the great authors, they lead into the very center of their work.

I think even great writers only write two books that you might like. When I think of my touchstone writers like Saul Bellow, I think of 'Henderson the Rain King.' With Don DeLillo, I think of 'Libra.'

The world is crawling with authors touring now. They're like performance artists.

Authors all have at least one thing in common, which is that when we finally get finished copies of our books, we get giddy as kindergartners. We touch them constantly, and build towers with them, and take pictures of our cats and dogs reading them.

Again, we turn down most books that have been self-published unless they have a special track record. We have taken a small number on, however, and sold them to major publishers for a nice sum. But that is an exception to the rule.

We're all in this together - when one writer succeeds, all writers succeed. I love discovering new authors. I think we need to take care of each other and talk about craft and nurture talent.

People take England on trust, and repeat that Shakespeare is the greatest of all authors. I have read him: there is nothing that compares Racine or Corneille: his plays are unreadable, pitiful.

There's a unique bond of trust between readers and authors that I don't believe exists in any other art form; as a reader, I trust a novelist to give me his or her best effort, however flawed.