When I was growing up, my house was filled with books. My mother was an educator, and my father was a history buff, so our home was a virtual library, covering every author from Beverly Cleary to James Michener.
I want to be an author.
'Lonesome Dove' by Larry McMurtry and 'The Poisonwood Bible' by Barbara Kingsolver have stuck with me throughout my life, and I think that says a lot about an author's writing.
Making lyrics feel natural, sit on music in such a way that you don't feel the effort of the author, so that they shine and bubble and rise and fall, is very, very hard to do. Whereas you can sit at the piano and just play and feel you're making art.
My job is essentially that of an entertainer, no different to that of a musician, no different to that of an actor. I just happen to be an author.
Every author believes that the book which he is placing before the public will 'fill a long-felt want,' and success or failure depends very much on how closely he has been able to gauge the nature of the 'long-felt want.'
A children's author on a soapbox is not a pleasant sight but I have become drawn into issues, slightly unwillingly, relating to young people, literacy and youth justice: just look at the number of young people we have locked up in prison, and the uselessness of it.
I think of myself as a very lazy author.
I think that the continuity of what I do as an editor with what I did when I started out 40 years ago is very direct. The delivery system is changing and will continue to, but the actual interaction between publisher and author is exactly the same.
My favorite author is David Baldacci; I've read all his books. I even have a picture with Baldacci taken during his book-signing in the States.
There is not less wit nor less invention in applying rightly a thought one finds in a book, than in being the first author of that thought.
Everything is different - except for publishing itself: getting hold of an amazing author, working to make his or her book the best and best-looking it can be, telling the world.
I admit to subscribing to all the celebrity rags. The best part of being an author is if the celebs aren't being ridiculous enough, you can just make it up.
If I ever stop acting, I'd like to be the author of that decision.
I'm better suited to be a director, I think. I see myself as the general author. I hate the word 'auteur,' because it sounds so solitary when filmmaking is anything but solitary.
In some instances, I would say the writer does deserve equal billing with the director. In other instances the director - especially if he wrote part of the script himself - is clearly more the author of the movie.
When you read 'author Katharine Holabird, creator of Angelina' and you're not even mentioned, you wince.
All writers, in all viewpoints, must choose which information and scenes will be presented, and in which order. In that sense, the author is always represented as a point of view in a work of fiction. His hand can always be detected by the discerning.
The author always knows more than the reader does at the start of a novel, and gradually, they share that knowledge with the reader - that's storytelling.
As a journalist for 35 years, and now author for 20, I've learned that there's always more.
Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I'm walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.
Armchair poverty tourism has been around as long as authors have written about class. As an author, I have struggled myself with the nuances of writing about poverty without reducing any community to a catalog of its difficulties.
When I was in my teens, I was very, very keen on being the author of a book. What the book was was secondary. I wanted it to be in hardback. I didn't care how thick or thin it was, and I didn't actually care what it was about.
I feel that historical novelists owe it to our readers to try to be as historically accurate as we can with the known facts. Obviously, we have to fill in the blanks. And then in the final analysis, we're drawing upon our own imaginations. But I think that readers need to be able to trust an author.
Good travel books, like travel itself, open the door to new worlds. In the strongest works the author's vision becomes our own, especially if his or her subject is a distant destination.
When an author is too meticulous about his style, you may presume that his mind is frivolous and his content flimsy.
One of the biggest turnoffs is being presented with an idea that's already, to a degree, complete. That's not an adventure, and it's not a learning experience. It's more of a chore. Then you become a technician with taste, as opposed to an explorer and an author.
I became a children's author by accident.
Usually, an author writes a manuscript that is handed in to the editor. The editor will then work with an art director to find just the right illustrator for the job, and off they go. Many times, the illustrator and author never meet.
I think a fictional invention grows according to its own development, not the author's. Characters in fiction are not simply as alive as you and me, they are more alive. Becky Sharp, Elizabeth Bennett, and Don Quixote may not outlive the burning out of the sun, but they will certainly outlive the brief candle of our lives.
I majored in journalism at Arizona State University, where I began writing the columns I write now, but I cannot, in good conscience, refer to myself as a writer. I'm a columnist, maybe a journalist, I guess I'm an author, but writer... no. That's not up to me to call myself, that's rather lofty. It's for the reader to decide.
There is no evidence that the author of the Book of Revelation, John of Patmos, read anything that we think of as a New Testament book. I don't see any evidence that he knew what was in the Gospels, or the letters of Paul, which I don't think he would have liked at all.
It was a different planet in 1967, the Broadway theatre. It had a little ashtray clamped to the back of every seat and the author got 10% of the gross.
I do my best to build a strong factual foundation for each of my novels and rely upon my author's notes to keep my conscience clear.
MWA and The Author's Guild refused to accept me as a member.
It's rare that I read more than two or three books by any one author; usually only one.