Every author really wants to have letters printed in the papers. Unable to make the grade, he drops down a rung of the ladder and writes novels.
Critics are sentinels in the grand army of letters, stationed at the corners of newspapers and reviews, to challenge every new author.
While growing up in Baltimore, Maryland, I dreamed of becoming many things: an archaeologist, an ambassador, an actor, an author.
Action is greater than writing. A good man is a nobler object of contemplation than a great author. There are but two things worth living for: to do what is worthy of being written; and to write what is worthy of being read.
The distribution might which Penguin brought to the table and the stature they gave me as an author is unparalleled.
At what point then is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us, it must spring up amongst us. It cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.
There is an element of autobiography in all fiction in that pain or distress, or pleasure, is based on the author's own. But in my case that is as far as it goes.
President Roosevelt, the author of Social Security, was the first to suggest that, in order to provide for the country's retirement needs, Social Security would need to be supplemented by personal savings accounts.
Your source material is the people you know, not those you don't know, but every character is an extension of the author's own personality.
Obviously there's a lot more to a TV show than just a book... I think adaptations are a bit tricky for the screenwriters because they're worried about upsetting the author.
As a traveler, I should probably count myself fortunate to be living in the jet age, and as an author, I know I am lucky to have a book tour at all.
You know, we love stories and we love narrative; we love to get lost in an author's world.
'Madame Bovary' advanced slowly, as slowly as it would have to have, given an author who held himself accountable to each word, that it be the right word, of which there could be only one.
An author must be nothing if he do not love truth; a barrister must be nothing if he do.
Sometimes the reader will decide something else than the author's intent; this is certainly true of attempts to empirically decipher reality.
I'm not over-enamored of complicated books, and wonder if it's more for the author's ego than anything else?
I have dreamt of being an author since the age of 14, and writing about my experiences has always been a part of digesting an experience and sharing it with others.
It seems to me that an author who has determined very new domains in literature is Gertrude Stein.
One might almost reckon mathematically that, having undergone the double composition of public opinion and of the author, their history reaches us at third hand and is thus separated by two stages from the original fact.
Being an author is always like being a well-run dictatorship - it's all one person speaking.
No author ever drew a character consistent to human nature, but he was forced to ascribe to it many inconsistencies.
I'm an author who likes assignments, who needs suggestions, ideas I would never have thought of otherwise - then something happens inside my alien head. Other people have to decide whether or not I'm a good writer, but I do have the ability to write in different styles.
Of all the writers I have read, Vladimir Nabokov has made the biggest impression on me because he, despite living through the 1917 February Revolution, forced exile amidst the anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany, the two World Wars and quite a lot of controversy, was an author who never gave up.
A narrative is like a room on whose walls a number of false doors have been painted; while within the narrative, we have many apparent choices of exit, but when the author leads us to one particular door, we know it is the right one because it opens.
When a French book becomes an international hit it is because of the author and not because of the language. The same goes for movies.
Why wouldn't - how couldn't - an author care about how his or her books look?
The only living works are those which have drained much of the author's own life into them.
Readers always seem to think that the author has some control over the design of their books.
Part of the process of reading is constantly hitting the pause button, and now and then the rewind button, to ponder a word that's been chosen by the author as exquisitely as the filmmaker chooses an image or a sound editor chooses a sonic clue - the tolling of a bell in the distance to evoke memory, for instance.
A bad book is as much of a labor to write as a good one, it comes as sincerely from the author's soul.
You can't believe anything that's written in an historical novel, and yet the author's job is always to create a believable world that readers can enter. It's especially so, I think, for writers of historical fiction.
Asking the author of historical novels to teach you about history is like expecting the composer of a melody to provide answers about radio transmission.
One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.
The two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.
Writing a song is much like being an author. Yes, we all have tools to write (everyone has a brain I hope!), but that doesn't all of a sudden make us best selling authors.
I think people enjoy a series. When you like a story, many readers want more of the same, which is dandy, if the author and the characters have more to say.
