Quotes on Author

Author: A fool who, not content with having bored those who have lived with him, insists on tormenting generations to come.

My #1 job as a thriller author is to give readers the best white-knuckle thrill ride I am capable of. I am first and foremost in the entertainment business. If that suspenseful ride is also terrifying because it hits really close to home, then I am once again doing what I am supposed to do as a thriller author.

The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.

I am a conventional science fiction author. But that said, once your work is published, it no longer belongs to you. It belongs to the readers and they will derive all sorts of interpretations.

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.

I'm fairly certain when I die that the obituary will say, 'Author of 'Angels in America' dies.' Unless I'm completely forgotten, and then it won't say anything at all.

Adapting a novel is not really about being faithful to every word and every moment the author has created. It's more about that same story being filtered through somebody else's sensibility.

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.

When you're in a play, 50 percent is the genius of the actor, 50 percent is the genius of the author. When a mime is not perfect, you see nothing.

The author of the Gospel of Judas wasn't against martyrdom, and he didn't ever insult the martyrs. He said it's one thing to die for God if you have to do that. But it's another thing to say that's what God wants, that this is a glorification of God.

I've been writing long enough to know that fiction, as a rhetorical mode, works very differently from expository writing. If an author has a specific critique about contemporary society in mind, fiction tends not to be the best means to deliver that critique.

Didn't you know I'm going to be the greatest, most entertaining author and artist in the world? Well, don't feel badly, I didn't either!

I think you get into trouble as an author and a journalist when, rather than owning the gaps, you try to elide them.

My son, Wolf, was born when I was past 40 and the author of a best-selling novel. That means he has grown up a middle-class child - one who sometimes asks me for stories of my childhood but knows nothing of what it means to grow up poor and afraid. I have worked to make sure of that.

When a Benefit is wrongly conferred, the author of the Benefit may often be said to injure.

If the book is a mystery to its author as she's writing, inevitably it's going to be a mystery to the reader as he or she reads it.

When I was publishing my first books, the previous generation of authors was fading away, so I was welcomed because I was a new author.

No sensible author wants anything but praise.

An unread author is an author who is a victim of the worst kind of censorship, indifference - a censorship more effective than the Ecclesiastical Index.

A critic should be taught to criticise a work of art without making any reference to the personality of the author.

One way an author dies a little each day is when his books go out of print.