Quotes About Authors

I've read many great samples, both of existing shows I liked and original pilots, and definitely hired the writers - or, at least, tried to!

Out of all artists, authors are the least trained for the spotlight. Wanting attention isn't a requisite part of the package.

I am a rereader. Quality is variety if you wait long enough. Barthes, Baudelaire, Benjamin, Celine, Duras, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Melville: There is so much to revisit. 'Ingrid Caven,' by Jean-Jacques Schuhl, is always in rotation. I used to read 'Morvern Callar,' by Alan Warner, every year - I adored that book.

In college, I started to get soaked in the materials. Subsequently, I worked with R.W.B. Lewis, Robert Penn Warren, and Cleanth Brooks on a history of American literature - I did that for seven or eight years. In the course of that work, my interest in Faulkner deepened and has been sustained ever since.

A lot of powerful people in Washington may think it's a crazy-leftist-fringe position to think the intellectual authors of a torture regime should be investigated and prosecuted.

I was very lucky to befriend many authors before even signing with an agent, and they were all so supportive of me when I told them I was in the middle of my first book.

Readers are always surprised to learn that authors have little or no input regarding the cover art for their books.

Writers usually don't get to pick our own covers. I know it's surprising to hear that.

Authors like reading. Go figure. So it's not surprising that we sometimes bog down in the research stage of new writing projects.

Not surprisingly, the chief way self-published authors get the word out about their books is through the Internet.

Hemingway says somewhere that the good writer competes only with the dead.

To be fair, much of the Bible is not systematically evil but just plain weird, as you would expect of a chaotically cobbled-together anthology of disjointed documents, composed, revised, translated, distorted and 'improved' by hundreds of anonymous authors, editors and copyists, unknown to us and mostly unknown to each other, spanning nine centuries.

And it is significant that some of the bitterest indictments of mass culture have come from writers who were, or still are, democratic socialists.

We weten niet wie de evangeliën geschreven hebben. Toen ze voor het eerst opdoken circuleerden ze anoniem, en ze werden pas later toegeschreven aan belangrijke figuren uit de jong christelijke kerken. De auteurs waren joodse christenen.

Publishing companies and a great many authors have missed the opportunity to capitalize on the very real relationships they create with their readers.

In general I do not draw well with literary men -- not that I dislike them but I never know what to say to them after I have praised their last publication.

Great men are rare, poets are rarer, but the great man who is a poet, transfiguring his greatness, is the rarest of all events.

For a man to write well, there are required three necessaries: to read the best authors, observe the best speakers, and much exercise of his own style.

I think in general, novels by men tend to be taken more seriously than novels by women.

American authors or scientists are prone to consider the wealthy businessman as a barbarian, as a man exclusively intent upon making money.

My mom didn't write, but she loved to read. She liked books 'that made you a little nervous.' Stephen King, Dean Koontz and Peter Straub were the three wise men of our family bookshelf.

Come on, man.... Hemingway, Sexton, Plath, Woolf. You can't kill yourself before you're even published.

Too much is written by the men who can't write about the men who do write.

I don't think I've ever been critical of the money Douglas Adams makes, especially since, as has been tactfully pointed out, I myself have had to change banks having filled the first one up.