Quotes About Authors

In Poland, for a while, my books all had cartoons on the cover. I trust my publishers in each country to know what works in their individual markets.

One may say without exaggeration that Les Misérables triggered War and Peace.[23] Giants breed giants.

Our American professors like their literature clear, cold, pure and very dead.

Everyone knows what made Berkeley notorious. He said that there were no material objects. He said the external world was in some sense immaterial, that nothing existed save ideas ideas and their authors. His contemporaries thought him very ingenious and a little mad.

Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel,. he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside.

I love reading. I'm fortunate enough to have signed books by Faulkner, Steinbeck, Thomas Pynchon.

I love picture books. I think some of the best people in children's books are the ones who create their own picture books. I wish I could say I'm one of them, but I'm not.

I love Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor. I read a lot of American writers.

From childhood on, I found many of my angels in favorite authors, writers who created books that enabled me to understand life with greater complexity. These works opened my heart to compassion, forgiveness, and understanding.

Because she knew nothing about the authors, she assumed they were contemporaries, unless something indicated this was obviously impossible. I was astonished at how much older literature can actually be read as if it were contemporary; to anyone ignorant of history, it would be easy to see ways of life in earlier times simply as ways of life in foreign countries.

As a past president of the Writers Guild, I think women shouldn't write for free. Maybe you have to do it for a time, to make a reputation, but I think the idea of giving your work away is the beginning of authors not being able to make a living.

In researching 'The Luminaries,' I did read quite a lot of 20th-century crime. My favourites out of that were James M. Cain, Dassiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler and Graham Greene and Patricia Highsmith.

Some people are just so happy to get published to, they sign anything. Next thing you know, they've signed over the rights to their book.

All of the changes in publishing since 1960 are significant. There are far fewer publishers.

Your basic, well-made novel by Ian McEwan or Jonathan Franzen just bores me silly.

I have learned not to read reviews. Period. And I hate reviewers. All of them, or at least all but two or three. Life is much simpler ignoring reviews and the nasty people who write them. Critics should find meaningful work.

Of all the things that the digital revolution has produced, once of the coolest, simplest ones is you can now contact people who write books that you read. You used to have to write a letter to the publisher and hope they passed it along, which they never did.

That was what I did at night. I read all the stuff that you're supposed to read in college but never do, or if you do, you're not paying attention. I read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky and Turgenev. I read Cervantes and Flaubert and Stendhal and Knut Hamsun, and I read every American except Faulkner.

All five of our twentieth-century literature Nobel laureates were alcoholics—Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck.

They met at one of the Bouchercon mystery conferences. Love among the midlist. "It's raining cats and dogs!" Ted announced, which gives you an idea of the sort of thing they write.

Don't say anything against indies. They're very sensitive. One hint of elitism and they'll be organizing a twitcott.

There's writing power in one word sentences and one sentence paragraphs. Wise authors use them. -Judith Briles

Just to show them that I wasn't a lot of hot air I'd say names to them – like "Bellow" and "Malamud" and "Albee" – you know, so they'd begin to trust me.

Even the contemporary horror authors who have seriously influenced me are a disparate bunch.