Quotes About Authors

It was one of the two questions people most frequently asked writers, and if he invited her to join him, it wouldn't take her long to get around to the other one. "I've always wanted to know, Colin. Where do you authors get your ideas?" We steal them. From extraterrestrials. There's a warehouse outside Tulsa…

Daphne Du Maurier and Anya Seton, all of Mary Stewart's early books, along with Victoria Holt, Phyllis Whitney

When male authors write love stories, the heroine tends to end up dead.

It seems a very specific bid: I´ll take Famous Authors for five hundred.

For purposes of marketing, writers are designated as poets, novelists, or something else. But writing is about matchmaking, an attempt to marry sensations with apt words.

Alan's publishing company was in the Brill Building, and of course, the Brill Building was where all the songwriters hung out because that's where all the publishers were.

Among contemporaries, I hugely admire Alice Munro, our Chekhov, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and John Updike, American masters all. I also believe that the voice of Gordon Lish is astoundingly original and sorrowful.

What is a literary festival? Imagine a sort of cross between school and church. There are no actual festivities; what there are is a lot of public readings.

As for advice for aspiring authors, the best I can give is to be brave. It sounds like a simple enough thing, but it's not. Rejection is such an integral part of this journey, and it never goes away.

Historians and journalists always have agendas, but if I want to find out what's going on in South Africa, I read Nadine Gordimer or John Coetzee because they offer novelistic truth.

At first I read mostly books by Southern authors - black and white - because almost all the people I knew were born and raised in the South, starting with my mother. I remember I got a lot of Erskine Caldwell.

they say that girls are the ones who want fairy tail endings, but then again, who are the authors of fairy tales? mostly men...

Authors, artists, and even philosophers are much better off having a very small number of fanatics behind them than a large number of people who appreciate their work. The number of persons who dislike the work don't count—there is no such thing as the opposite of buying your book, or the equivalent of losing points in a soccer game, and this absence of negative domain for book sales provides the author with a measure of optionality.

The situation is even more lopsided with book sales. If I told you that two authors sold a total of a million copies of their books, the most likely combination is 993,000 copies sold for one and 7,000 for the other. This is far more likely than that the books each sold 500,000 copies. For any large total, the breakdown will be more and more asymmetric. Why

Plutarch, Livy, Suetonius, Diodorus Siculus, Gibbon, Carlyle, Renan, and Michelet.

The truth, however, was that there was very little greatness. It was almost nonexistent, invisible. But you could be sure that the worst writers had the most confidence, the least self-doubt. Anyway, writers were to be avoided, and I tried to avoid them, but it was almost impossible. They hoped for some sort of brotherhood, some kind of togetherness. None of it had anything to do with writing, none of it helped at the typewriter.

Listen, is it true that Celine and Hemingway died on the same day?

Amazon can deal directly with writers and publish—and distribute—their work to the public, what need is there for the publishing houses? The means of production are in the hands of the masses now, not in the hands of the elites.

I can't stand it when writers moan about what film-makers might do or have done to their books. There's a very simple answer: don't take the money.

The two contemporary writers whom I consider as role models are Janet Malcolm and Michael Lewis.

I read Lorrie Moore and Marilynne Robinson and Jhumpa Lahiri and Richard Ford, John Updike, Anton Chekhov, Vladimir Nabokov - all of whom I really fell in love with.

We're not just writers; we're readers probably more than anything else. That's how you learn how to write and how you learn to appreciate good writing: by reading.

BORN: 1856 George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman, Major Barbara), Dublin 1894 Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Crome Yellow), Godalming, England DIED: 1934 Winsor McCay

He says his aim is poetry. One does not aim at poetry with pistols. At poets, perhaps.