Quotes About Authors

People would react to books by authors like James and Austen almost on a gut level. I think it was not so much the message, because the best authors do not have obvious messages. These authors were disturbing to my students because of their perspectives on life.

I think it's always good to read local authors or relevant books. In Egypt, I studied hieroglyphics and read everything about the mummies.

I was studying with Peter Carey, Colum McCann; but also, my fellow students were really critical readers for me.

I read everything and anything related to being queer. I found solace in reading authors like Audre Lorde and bell hooks, who would become my activist staples - their words helped me grow up and taught me how to be bold and courageous. By studying them, I came to understand that being young and queer and black would not be easy.

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.

New Testament authors all may have been premillennialists, they may all have been amillennialists, or some may not have had a particular worked-out conviction. But all were oriented to the idea of fulfillment in Christ and then in his people, in both his first and his second comings. This central motif rather than the Millennium as such dominated teaching about the future.

The best things that have been written, almost, are by Catholics during the counter Reformation: Ignatius of Loyola, St. Francis de Sales, John of the Cross, St. Theresa of ?vila.....great stuff.

I think editors are excellent marketers. They know their audience and produce copy to appeal to them - they just don't call it marketing.

The trouble with the publishing business is that too many people who have half a mind to write a book do so.

House of Anansi Press was founded in 1967 with a mandate to publish Canadian-authored

The Left Behind series by Jerry Jenkins and Tim LaHaye presents a detailed and adrenaline-laced roadmap for the authors' beliefs about Biblical end-times prophecy.

The question authors get asked more than any other is Where do you get your ideas from? And we all find a way of answering which we hope isn't arrogant or discouraging. What I usually say is 'I don't know where they come from, but I know where they come to: they come to my desk, and if I'm not there, they go away again.

Now Sentimental Education doesn't read as if Flaubert was having fun; Letter to His Father doesn't read as if Kafka was having fun; The Sorrows of Young Werther sure as hell doesn't read as if Goethe was having fun. Sure, Henry Miller seems like he's having fun, but he had to cross three thousand miles of Atlantic before saying 'cunt'.

None of the other famous phallocrats of Updike's generation—not Mailer, not Exley or Roth or even Bukowski—excites such violent dislike.

The writers she prefers are long dead and are on the wordy side. If the novel on the sofa is 700 pages long, and the author photo is an engraving, it's either hers or Hugh's.

Unpublished authors tend to be more concerned than published authors about the possibility that somebody might steal their ideas. This is because published authors know that there is no end of ideas, and what you're selling is largely in the execution.

We also sold books, creating several best sellers and helping to put unknown authors on the map.

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: 'My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, "The Cookiepants Hypotenuse."' Or else they get unbearably cutesy: 'My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn't oo, squeezums?

So what? All writers are lunatics!

Books are people,'' smiled Miss Marks. ''In every book worth reading, the author is there to meet you, to establish contact with you. He takes you into his confidence and reveals his thoughts to you.

Authors often leave their sentences unfinished like that—at least the kind who come to Wentworth's do—and they are always men. Women authors seem to bother less about local color, or perhaps they bother more. Perhaps they actually pack a couple of suitcases and trek off to Borneo or Canada or wherever it may be, before they send their hero there to hob-nob with head-hunters or to track moose.

Authors can easily produce ebook versions of novels and shorter work which publishers don't own.

Authors are free to ignore their editors' advice. I often avail myself of this veto power - sometimes out of a pigheadedness for which I'll pay the price.

I went to the Sorbonne in Paris for two years and read all the classics by authors like Victor Hugo and Guy de Maupassant. I was supposed to read them in French but I cheated and used the English versions instead.