933 Quotes About Authors

The out-dated imagery of sitting over a dusty typewriter staring at blank pages for years is a fallacy and probably designed to keep you from living up to your fullest potential.

An increasing number of people are taking advantage of having a leg up on their competition by branding themselves as "the expert" in their particular niche. Call it a business card, a resume, a billboard, or whatever you choose, but the long and short of it is that books are no longer just books. They are branding devices and credibility builders, not to mention door openers. Books are the reason that authors command large speaking and consulting fees.

all that really matters to me is that there are critics.

Authors are merely the medium between the words and the page.

There was, in my view, an unwritten contract with the reader that the writer must honour. No single element of an imagined world or any of its characters should be allowed to dissolve on an authorial whim. The invented had to be as solid and as self-consistent as the actual. This was a contract founded on mutual trust.

Fiction and non-fiction are only different techniques of story telling. For reasons I do not fully understand, fiction dances out of me. Non-fiction is wrenched out by the aching, broken world I wake up to every morning.

We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers - thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams.

Art is a conversation we are all invited to and are all worthy to participate in. Yes, great works can be intimidating, but no one else in the world has what you have—your voice, your eyes, your feeling and perspective. Other people have written great books, but no one else will ever write YOUR book. It's worth writing. That is the belief that carries me through.

I never read prefaces, and it is not much good writing things just for people to skip. I wonder other authors have never thought of this.