933 Quotes About Authors

The lives of most authors - even, or perhaps especially, the great ones - are necessarily a catalogue of tedious inwardness and cloistered composition. Globe-trotting Hemingways and brawling Christopher Marlowes are the exception, not the rule.

I should tell you that many people think that authors just cut and paste from real life into books. It doesn't work quite that way.

We get hit with the 'jukebox musical' label, but (book authors Marshall Brickman and Rick Elice) and (director) Des McAnuff accomplished a 50-50 split between music and drama, ... The music is very important, but the history of the group makes it a great piece of theater.

Authors worry. We worry about writing. Worry about our editors, our agents, our reviews, and our readers. We worry about everything, including all forms of social media including blogs, Facebook, Twitter, and personal websites.

I feel a bit like Ellen Glasgow (I think it was) who said that she was the master and characters did what she said. I'm envious of authors whose characters become so real to them that they take off in their own directions, but my philosophy of teaching, as well as writing, is to demystify the process.

I deal with the authors I work with, agents, and other departments of the company, talking about both the books that I'm working on and everyone else's. Then there's dealing with foreign publishers: foreigners visit all the time. People want to bounce things off the publisher, and a lot of it is encouragement.

A lot of great authors are published before their time. That's not wrong; it's just the way it works.

I read reviews and consider myself pretty 'plugged in' to the literary cosmos, yet one of the things I love best about book-touring is the opportunity to compare notes with favorite booksellers around the country. I always come home with books by authors I'd never heard of - or books I've read about but didn't realize I might love.

I have no problem selling ebooks for authors directly as an agent, but partnering with them is another matter.