Quotes About Authors

After the Tiananmen Massacre, I felt compelled not only to continue writing but to actively resist the restrictions placed on freedom of speech. I set up the publishing company in Hong Kong, with offices in Shenzhen in mainland China, and managed to publish works of fiction, philosophy, and politics by unapproved authors.

All writers start out mimicking other writers. I've never relinquished that. I have a good ear for speech and writing patterns.

I think J.D. Salinger is correct in granting no interviews, and in making no speeches.

Mostly, I would like people to ask other writers about the craft of their writing so we could learn from one another. We ask movie directors why they chose to use certain lights and angles and speeds of film, but most of the time, we ignore the craft of a writer.

Now it is quite clear to me that there are no solid spheres in the heavens, and those that have been devised by the authors to save the appearances, exist only in the imagination.

Of the authors published under Ballantine's Adult Fantasy logo, only Evangeline Walton 'spoke' to me.

Lewis Carroll and J. M. Barrie were very strange men, and such is the nature of the written word that their personal strangeness shines straight through all the layers of Disneyfication like X-rays through a wall. Probably

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?

The less he sees of other writers the more of a writer he will ultimately become. When he sees scarcely anyone except other writers, he is ready for New York.

Above all things -- read. Read the great stylists who cannot be copied rather than the successful writers who must not be copied.

Multiculturalism and academic feminism started disparaging works of genius on the basis of their authors' sex and race.

I was enamored with Charles Dickens as a kid, and his names blew me away.

If you were to ask me to pick my favourite author, well, there are so many of them, I'd really just have to say the first names that came to mind, and I'm sure that I'll later think 'Oh, I should have mentioned that one.'

For a writer, the Book Festival is interesting because you bump into all these other writers whose work you know, whose names you know, and you have a chance to put a person with the name and the work.

Authors who moan with praise for their editors always seem to reek slightly of the Stockholm syndrome.

The most satisfying compliment a reader can pay is to tell me that he or she feels personally addressed. Think of your own favorite authors and see if that isn't precisely one of the things that engages you, often at first without your noticing it.

Gray squirrels are solitary feeders, but they know a good deal when they see it, so even if it's against their nature, they'll put up with each other if there's a free lunch. Authors are like that as well.)

To put it simply, we think books are too important to leave to writers, and we want the wisest, most experienced, most knowledgeable people on earth to be able to effectively and easily share their wisdom with the world.

And this? Aldhelm of Malmesbury. Listen to this page: 'Primitus pantorum procerum poematorum pio potissimum paternoque presertim privilegio panegiricum poemataque passim prosatori sub polo promulgatas.' ... The words all begin with the same letter! The men of my islands are all a bit mad, William said proudly.

But I must hope that books possess a life of a more varied kind than their authors' myopia concedes to them. A book is a kind of of machine which the reader can freely use as a generator of intellectual stimulation. It is enough that the book should be truly a machine for thinking, that it should generate a variety of possible conclusions without its author's ordaining and limiting them in advance.

Se publican muchos libros escritos por estúpidos, porque a primera vista son muy convincentes. El redactor editorial no está obligado a reconocer al estúpido.

Lampedusa, Bassani y Cassola. Por mi parte, hoy

Ruth Rendell, Reginald Hill, P.D. James, Ernest Tidyman, John Le Carré, Norman Mailer, Penelope Fitzgerald and Colin Dexter all transported

But also, surprisingly, Charles Willeford, Ken Bruen and James Sallis.