Quotes About Author

The one man who should never attempt an explanation of a poem is its author. If the poem can be improved by it's author's explanations it never should have been published, and if the poem cannot be improved by its author's explanations the explanations are scarcely worth reading.

Editors can be stupid at times. They just ignore that author's intention. I always try to read unabridged editions, so much is lost with cut versions of classic literature, even movies don't make sense when they are edited too much. I love the longueurs of a book even if they seem pointless because you can get a peek into the author's mind, a glimpse of their creative soul. I mean, how would people like it if editors came along and said to an artist, 'Whoops, you left just a tad too much space around that lily pad there, lets crop that a bit, shall we?'. Monet would be ripping his hair out.

I do that a lot of authors still do not do is allow people to write directly to me. I get about 50 fan letters a day, and I answer every single one of them myself. It takes a lot of time and sometimes it's a pain in the neck and I answer the same questions over and over. But the truth is these people come to my readings clutching these letters saying, "You wrote me back. I can't believe you wrote me back", and I think it really means a lot for them to know that the author values them just as much as they value the author.

One thing should be put firmly. Where people have commented on that novel [The Paper Men], they generally criticize the poor academic, Rick L. Tucker, who is savaged by the author, Wilfred Barclay. I don't think people have noticed that I have been far ruder about Barclay than I have been about Tucker. Tucker is a fool, but Barclay is a swine. The author really gets his come-uppance.

The stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.

Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know; for an author most hurts his readers by concealing difficulties.

WARNING: The following is a transcript of a digital recording. In certain places, the audio quality was poor, so some words and phrases represent the author's best guesses. Where possible, illustrations of important symbols mentioned in the recording have been added. Background noises such as scuffling, hitting, and cursing by the two speakers have not been transcribed The author makes no claims for the authenticity of the recording. It seems impossible that the two young narrators are telling the truth, but you, the reader, must decide for yourself.

There was something appealing in thinking of a character with a secret life that her author knew nothing about. Slipping off while the author's back was turned, to find love in her own way. Showing up just in time to deliver the next bit of dialogue with an innocent face.

Great literature must spring from an upheaval in the author's soul. If that upheaval is not present then it must come from the works of any other author which happens to be handy and easily adapted.

Here's what I think: the best author photo ever taken is the author photo of you holding your extra-large engulfing rabbit and looking straight at the camera. I never hope to have one so good. The only way I guess it could be any more literary is if the rabbit were smoking a Gauloise and drinking a tiny cup of coffee.

Hollywood, to hear some writers tell it, is the place where they take an author's steak tartare and make cheeseburger out of it. Upon seeing the film, they say, the author promptly cuts his throat, bleeding to death in a pool of money.

It is the shared experience - [although] you're the conduit of the sound, the recipient is also in some way the author of the work, because if they weren't the author of the work they wouldn't be able to recognise it as an experience, you could argue. The more distance you can put between yourself and having any kind of objective the more likely it is to appear.

I am not a "Christian author." I am an author who is a Christian. While my books reflect my faith, they are not intended as teaching tools for a Christian audience per se. My books are stories created around principles that work for everyone and they work every time.

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.

I have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.

When you do not recognize the wrongs of the past, the future takes its revenge. -Author forgotten

A Diogenesian search for an honest person would rarely lead to the author of a memoir.

From whence shall we expect the approach of danger? Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow? Never. All the armies of Europe and Asia...could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track on the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years. No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide.

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.

The author I wish I was reading right now and always is Nora Ephron. I love the humor, the awareness, the sense of self-deprecation. She is such a role model to me.

I have been luckier than anyone I know or even heard of. I had a very happy childhood, a good education, I enjoyed working as a teacher, journalist and author. I have loved a wonderful man for over 33 years, and I believe he loves me, too.

Becoming a YA author was actually a very lucky accident. When I wrote the Queen of Everything, I thought it was a book for adults.

All the best performers bring to their role something more, something different than what the author put on paper. That's what makes theatre live. That's why it persists.

A critic is never too severe when he only detects the faults of an author. But he is worse than too severe when, in consequence of this detection, be presumes to place himself on a level with genius.

Time is the best author. It always writes the perfect ending.

As an author, you need to keep talking to your audience to remind yourself what they like and what they don't like. You spend most of your life locked in a room, and you need to be social occasionally.

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.

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.

My main reason for adopting literature as a profession was that, as the author is never seen by his clients, he need not dress respectably.

The virtue of dress rehearsals is that they are a free show for a select group of artists and friends of the author, and where for one unique evening the audience is almost expurgated of idiots.

There are directors, and there are authors. I think I am more of an author than a director.

As a writer I am proud that if you took my last four books, and they didn't have my name on them, I don't think readers would know they were by the same author.

Sons of the Dawn is a page-turner, and author Hank Nuwer is to be thanked for enriching our sense of the West with this memorable novel.

Have you ever observed that we pay much more attention to a wise passage when it is quoted, than when we read it in the original author?

Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.

I hadn’t been in proper school in three years. My parents were my two best friends. My third best friend was an author who did not know I existed.

Readers will share in the environs of the author and her characters, be taken into the hardship of a pitiless place and emerge on the other side — wiser, warier and weathered like the landscape.

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.

No author dislikes to be edited as much as he dislikes not to be published.

I am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch.

I was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.

I don't think that you can be prescriptive about anything, I mean, life is too complicated. Maybe there are novels where the author has not in the least thought about it in terms of film, which can be turned into good films.

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 would go fifty miles on foot to kiss the hand of that man whose generous heart will give up the reins of his imagination into his Author's hands; be pleased, he knows not why, and cares not wherefore.

[T]he judicious reader ought to know what the chief character in any work of the imagination will naturally perform, according to the situation he is thrown into, as well as doth the author himself.

The kind of sleep that I had during my own film [Certified Copy] screening in Cannes is different. It's not because of the specificity of the film. It was because of my relationship as an author to this film. Usually when I take my films to festivals, I feel incredibly anxious about them. I wonder how it will be received, how the audience will react. I feel deeply responsible for them. Whereas this time, I didn't have that responsibility on my shoulders.