Quotes About Author

When a character is born, he acquires at once such an independence, even of his own author, that he can be imagined by everybody even in many other situations where the author never dreamed of placing him; and so he acquires for himself a meaning which the author never thought of giving him.

I know publishing now more as an author than with occasional peaks inside those elite offices than as an industry insider. It was difficult publishing a novel the first time around, while working behind the scenes, knowing all that has to happen to make a book a success and to still make the leap as an author.

Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide.

You don't expect me to know what to say about a play when I don't know who the author is, do you? . . . If it's by a good author, it's a good play, naturally. That stands to reason.

"The best is oftentimes the enemy of the good;" and without claiming for an instant that title of good for my book, I do not doubt that many a good book has remained unwritten, or, perhaps, being written, has remained unpublished, because there floated before the mind's eye of the author, or possible author, the ideal of a better or a best, which has put him out of all conceit with his good.

The work of one author or artist may stimulate another author or artist to push the edge, to take the risk, to go where the field hasn't gone before. The result -very exciting children's literature and art ... exciting both for the professional and for the intended audience, the children.

Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.

Fiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.

When you want to put something into your part that is not in the play, you must ask the author-or some other author-to lead up to the interpolation for you. Never forget that the effect of a line may depend not on its delivery, but on something said earlier in the play, either by somebody else or by yourself, and that if you change it, it may be necessary to change the whole first act as well.

Reading with an eye towards metaphor allows us to become the person we’re reading about, while reading about them. That’s why there is symbols in books and why your English teacher deserves your attention. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the author intended the symbol to be there because the job of reading is not to understand the author’s intent. The job of reading is to use stories as a way into seeing other people as a we ourselves.

The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.

Whoever commits to paper what he suffers becomes a melancholy author: but he becomes a serious author when he tells us what he suffered and why he now reposes in joy.

The art path leads you to be increasingly free. And what does "because of being increasingly free" mean? Julio Ramón Ribeyro used to say a mature novel demands the author's death, not literal death but metaphoric death, which is the author has to truly erase himself. Therefore, to be truly free, you have to break free from internal and external pressures, to erase the self completely and become a sort of medium, let the story pass through yourself and let the story dance with you.

There are many readers of the book, who don't know anything about the authors and the artists. There is more than one author. It doesn't matter, if you can't make the reader dive into the story and surround him with that environment and those characters. That's an experience that lasts longer than figuring out who did what. I think that's what makes our working relationship better, it helps us to make a book that feels unique and not like different voices.

If the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

Every man is the author of his own life.

Some people connect with a story and may find between the lines something that might be useful to him or her, but that's not the intention of the author, I think. At least not mine.

An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.

Because I'm the author of my screenplays I know what I'm looking for. It's true that I can be stubborn in demanding that I get what I want, but it's also a question of working with patience and love.

The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one's own style and creatively adjust this to one's author.

If modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.

I suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author.

I suppose I'd have to say that my favourite author is Homer. After Homer's Ilaid, I'd name The Odyssey, and then I'd mention a number of plays of Euripides.

The signal instances of Providential goodness which we have experienced and which have now almost crowned our labors with complete success demand from us in a peculiar manner the warmest returns of gratitude and piety to the Supreme Author of all good.

He is intangible and invisible. But His work is more powerful than the most ferocious wind. The Spirit brings order out of chaos and beauty out of ugliness. He can transform a sin-blistered man into a paragon of virtue. The Spirit changes people. The Author of life is also the Transformer of life.

Classic author moment, "Oh dear, did I kill that character or not?

Adaptation of books is never a success. When the author wants to make it, it's even worse.

To translate, one must have a style of his own, for the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of one’s own style and creatively adjust this to one’s author.

Every author ought to write every book as if he were going to be beheaded the day he finished it.

Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

If I had an author superpower, I would like to have the ability to stop time for everyone else. I feel like I have to disappear into myself to write books. I go away, into my head, for hours and weeks at a time, and I hate that I miss everything. It's pretty selfish to want to pause other people, isn't it?

There is no less invention in aptly applying a thought found in a book, than in being the first author of the thought.

All fiction becomes autobiographical when the author has true talent.

The way a book is read, which is to say, the qualities a reader brings to a book can have as much to do with its worth as anything the author puts into it.

I always give books. And I always ask for books. I think you should reward people sexually for getting you books. Don't send a thank-you note, repay them with sexual activity. If the book is rare or by your favorite author or one you didn't know about, reward them with the most perverted sex act you can think of. Otherwise, you can just make out.

A story of remarkable simplicity and charm. A young swimmer invites us into sea off the coast of California where through her eyes we see an entire realm of creatures we have never known so intimately before. Truly for people of all ages, Lynne Cox's adventure with the baby whale, Grayson, becomes a parable and an experience, thanks not only to the author's great and generous spirit, but through her immense gift for describing nature.

No author ever spar'd a brother.

I'm not an actual author but an accidental one.

What does it mean to feel "in control" of your life? What I mean by control is the ability to make a choice. Personal sovereignty means that you choose from what is available in order to be intentional about your life...When you feel in control of your life, you know yourself to be the author of your own actions and know that you always have choices.

I couldn't really experience being an author when I was still working in publishing - I was trying to negotiate being both. Sometimes the knowledge doesn't translate between the two roles.

An author knows his landscape best; he can stand around, smell the wind, get a feel for his place.

In writing the history of a disease, every philosophical hypothesis whatsoever, that has previously occupied the mind of the author, should lie in abeyance.

The Physician, by the study and inspection of urine and ordure, approves himself in the science; and in like sort should our author accustom and exercise his imagination upon the dregs of nature.

Shakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.

There is no word or action but may be taken with two hands,--either with the right hand of charitable construction, or the sinister interpretation of malice and suspicion; and all things do succeed as they are taken. To construe an evil, action well is but a pleasing and profitable deceit to myself; but to misconstrue a good thing is a treble wrong,--to myself, the action, and the author.

The Noonday Demon explores the subterranean realms of an illness which is on the point of becoming endemic, and which more than anything else mirrors the present state of our civilization and its profound discontents. As wide-ranging as it is incisive, this astonishing work is a testimony both to the muted suffering of millions and to the great courage it must have taken the author to set his mind against it.

How can a good God appoint cruel people to positions of authority? The answer is simple: God is the originator of the authority, but He is not the author of the cruelty. Man is responsible for his cruel actions, not God. All authority is of God, but not all authority is godly.