Aspiring Authors Quotes

When trying to be a famous anything behave as if you already are
Liam Leddy 22/08/13 ~ Liam Leddy

It is not lack of ability, but lack of motivation, lack of focus, and lack of self-confidence that prevents most aspiring authors from finishing what they started. ~ Gudjon Bergmann

I'm a struggling writer, I'm struggling to convince people I'm a writer. ~ Tom Conrad

Silicon Valley isn't usually where aspiring authors go to kick-start a literary reputation. [ ... ] How'd he do it? By courting bloggers and influential techies like Joi Ito, Stewart Brand, and Craig Newmark demonstrating that if you can get the geek grapevine on your side, you don't need Random House. ~ Daniel Suarez

Because as any writer will tell you, an IDEA for a book is like falling in love, it's all wild emotion and headlong rush, but the ACTUAL ACT of writing a book is like building a relationship: it is joyous, slow, fragile, frustrating, exhilarating, painstaking, exhausting, worth it. ~ Ben H. Winters

Aspiring authors, get this through your head. Cover art serves one purpose, and one purpose only, to get potential customers interested long enough to pick up the book to read the back cover blurb. In the internet age that means the thumb nail image needs to be interesting enough to click on. That's what covers are for. ~ Larry Correia

My three key pieces of advice to aspiring authors are: 1) Read as much as you can, 2) write as much as you can, and 3) become a keen observer of life. And once you've done that, finish the @#$% book. ~ Tera Lynn Childs

And against whom is this censorship directed? By way of answer, think back to the big subcultural debates of 2011 – debates about how gritty fantasy isn't really fantasy; how epic fantasy written from the female gaze isn't really fantasy; how women should stop complaining about sexism in comics because clearly, they just hate comics; how trying to incorporate non-Eurocentric settings into fantasy is just political correctness gone wrong and a betrayal of the genre's origins; how anyone who finds the portrayal of women and relationships in YA novels problematic really just wants to hate on the choices of female authors and readers; how aspiring authors and bloggers shouldn't post negative reviews online, because it could hurt their careers; how there's no homophobia in publishing houses, so the lack of gay YA protagonists can only be because the manuscripts that feature them are bad; how there's nothing problematic about lots of pretty dead girls on YA covers; how there's nothing wrong with SF getting called 'dystopia' when it's marketed to teenage girls, because girls don't read SF. Most these issues relate to fear of change in the genre, and to deeper social problems like sexism and racism; but they are also about criticism, and the freedom of readers, bloggers and authors alike to critique SFF and YA novels without a backlash that declares them heretical for doing so.


It's not enough any more to tiptoe around the issues that matter, refusing to name the wor ~ Foz Meadows

The stranglehold of the departed was much resented by the new generation of aspiring authors. Which is why it is who did make the breakthrough were so admired. ~ Andrew Pettegree

The difference between wanting to write and having written is one year of hard, relentless labour. It's a bridge you have to build all by yourself, all alone, all through the night, while the world goes about its business without giving a damn. The only way of making this perilous passage is by looking at it as a pilgrimage. ~ Shatrujeet Nath

The modern picture of the artist began to form: The poor, but free spirit, plebeian but aspiring only to be classless, to cut himself forever free from the bonds of the greedy bourgeoisie, to be whatever the fat burghers feared most, to cross the line wherever they drew it, to look at the world in a way they couldn't see, to be high, live low, stay young forever
in short, to be the bohemian. ~ Thomas Wolfe

When I want to read a novel, I write one. ~ Benjamin Disraeli

My mother teases my father, saying he can only create people, while authors can create entire worlds. ~ Jay Kristoff

You may receive a pie, eat it and forget. You may receive champagne, drink it and forget. But when you receive a book, you can open it again and again. ~ Israelmore Ayivor

Amazon was a family affair in another way. MacKenzie, an aspiring novelist, ~ Brad Stone

To what extent are we the authors, the creators of our own experiences? How much are these predetermined by the brains or senses we are born with, and to what extent do we shape our brains through experience? The effects of a profound perceptual deprivation such as blindness may cast an unexpected light on these questions. Going blind, especially later in life, presents one with a huge, potentially overwhelming challenge: to find a new way of living, of ordering one's world, when the old has been destroyed. ~ Oliver Sacks

Authors are like cattle going to a fair: those of the same field can never move on without butting one another. ~ Walter Savage Landor

Fool! Nothing but black ink runs through my veins! ~ Hiromu Arakawa

And I love Jane Austen's use of language too
the way she takes her time to develop a phrase and gives it room to grow, so that these clever, complex statements form slowly and then bloom in my mind. Beethoven does the same thing with his cadence and phrasing and structure. It's a fact: Jane Austen is musical. And so's Yeats. And Wordsworth. All the great writers are musical. ~ Andrew Clements

Genuineness is often sacrificed in order to showcase the author's control over the form and subject matter, the end result technically sound but emotionally cold. ~ Jennifer S. Davis

Edited by mostly unknown scholars in A.D. 367, compiled from documents written 30 to 110 years after the Christ event by no one who was present at the events, and composed for the most part by unknown authors in the Greek language that Jesus never spoke, it is held up as the only true record of the Christ story. ~ Leonard Shlain

Tonight, however, Dickens struck him in a different light. Beneath the author's sentimental pity for the weak and helpless, he could discern a revolting pleasure in cruelty and suffering, while the grotesque figures of the people in Cruikshank's illustrations revealed too clearly the hideous distortions of their souls. What had seemed humorous now appeared diabolic, and in disgust at these two favourites he turned to Walter Pater for the repose and dignity of a classic spirit.

But presently he wondered if this spirit were not in itself of a marble quality, frigid and lifeless, contrary to the purpose of nature. 'I have often thought', he said to himself, 'that there is something evil in the austere worship of beauty for its own sake.' He had never thought so before, but he liked to think that this impulse of fancy was the result of mature consideration, and with this satisfaction he composed himself for sleep.

He woke two or three times in the night, an unusual occurrence, but he was glad of it, for each time he had been dreaming horribly of these blameless Victorian works…

It turned out to be the Boy's Gulliver's Travels that Granny had given him, and Dicky had at last to explain his rage with the devil who wrote it to show that men were worse than beasts and the human race a washout. A boy who never had good school reports had no right to be so morbidly sensitive as to penetrate to the underlying cynicism of Swift's delightful fable, and th ~ Margaret Irwin

What really knocks me out is a book that, when you're all done reading it, you wish the author that wrote it was a terrific friend of yours and you could call him up on the phone whenever you felt like it. That doesn't happen much, though. ~ J.D. Salinger

When I became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman authors, I thought it incumbent upon me to do something towards the honor of the place of my nativity, and to vindicate the rhetoric of this ancient forum of our Metropolis from the aspersions of the illiterate by composing A Treatise of the Alercation of the Ancients; wherein I have demonstrated that the purity, sincerity, and simplicity of their diction is nowhere so well preserved as amongst my neighbourhood. ~ John Arbuthnot

Many people are partial to the notion that ... all writers are somehow mere vessels for Truth and Beauty when they compose. That we are not really in control. This is a variation on that twee little fable that writers like to pass off on gullible readers, that a character can develop a will of his own and 'take over a book.' This makes writing sound supernatural and mysterious, like possession by faeries. The reality tends to involve a spare room, a pirated copy of MS Word, and a table bought on sale at Target. A character can no more take over your novel than an eggplant and a jar of cumin can take over your kitchen. ~ Paul Collins

I lived in a big bunkhouse of thirty farm workers with Leroy, who was a stranger to me in many ways because he was always talking about unions and unity. But he had a way of explaining the meanings of words in utter simplicity, like "work" which he translated into "power," and "power" into "security." I was drawn to him because I felt that he had lived in many places where the courage of men was tested with the cruelest weapons conceivable. ~ Carlos Bulosan

Sand lines my soul which is filled with the breath of the ocean. ~ A.D. Posey

Aspiring beggary is wretchedness itself. ~ Oliver Goldsmith

Roth Unbound is filled with intelligent readings and smart judgments. Because of the author's sympathy and sharp mind, it offers real insight into the creative process itself, and into Philip Roth's high calling as a great American artist. The book is, in some ways, a radical rereading of Roth's life and his work. It is impossible, by the end, not to feel a tender admiration for Roth as a novelist and indeed for Claudia Roth Pierpont as an empathetic and brilliant critic. ~ Colm Toibin

The campaign of anti-Islamic slander was so successful that to this day some textbooks in European and American schools refer to Muhammad as having epilepsy, the Qur'an as being copied from Bible, Muslim armies forcing conversions on people (by the sword), and Islam as being against science and learning. All of these are quite untrue, and enlightened Western authors from Arnold Toynbee and Bertrand Russell to Yvonne Haddad and John Esposito have been dispelling these myths on book after book for decades; nevertheless, the message hasn't reached the masses, who still believe numerous myths concerning Islam. ~ Yahiya Emerick

With so many book projects filling mind and heart, it feels similar to pregnancy. Your own books are like your children - you have to give birth to them, raise them, and do your best to make sure they live happily. You know, you just HAVE TO put into writing all of those thoughts, words and ideas appearing and growing in your head. Otherwise, life will make no sense without it. ~ Sahara Sanders

I guess what inspires me most is the desire to draw out feelings that feel best expressed on the written page by really good authors, and I'm not a really good author. I feel like my job as a filmmaker is to eff the ineffable, to take feelings that only poets could describe with words and try to project them on the screen for viewers to feel. I don't think I've succeeded once but in the act of trying I've come up with all these other results which sometimes intrigue me. ~ Guy Maddin

It's actually as simple as this. New authors, building their customer base, need physical bookshops. Physical bookshops are lovely tactile, friendly, expert, welcoming places. Physical books, which can only be seen and handled in physical bookshops, are lovely, tactile things. Destroy those bookshops, and the very commercial and cultural base to the book industry is destroyed. Once and for all. Like Humpty Dumpty, it can never be put together again. ~ Tim Waterstone

When David Markson wrote in June to complain about an author's getting an award he though should have been his, Wallace gently warned him away from the pitfall of envy: Mostly I try to remember how lucky I am to be able to write, and doubly, triply lucky I am that anyone else is willing to read it, to say nothing of publishing it. I'm no pollyanna - this keeping-the-spirits-up shit is hard work, and I don't often do it well. But I try ... Life is good ~ D.T. Max

i have laughed
more than daffodils
and cried more than June. ~ Sanober Khan

I think the more avenues that open up when people want to publish, the better. Some of the authors that want to jump ship from the traditional houses and go on their own, you know what? Good luck. It's going to be a lot tougher than you think. ~ Vince Flynn

Having authored numerous and pretty versatile write-ups, I can't say that anything other than my soul, heart and life experience can be called a prominent part of every book I ever wrote ~ Sahara Sanders

I see who I am, and I am beyond who I was. ~ Steven Cuoco

Once a man has seen a dragon in flight, let him stay home and tend his garden in content, someone had written once, for this wide world has no greater wonder. Tyrion scratched at his scar and tried to recall the author's name. ~ George R R Martin

But stories aren't always lies. They are things stored in all our imaginations-hence the name stories-and it is the author's job to point them out. ~ Matt Haig

What frightens me most is the danger that, amid all the constant trivial preoccupations of private life, ambition may lose both its force and its greatness, that human passions may grow gentler and at the same time baser, with the result that the progress of the body social may become daily quieter and less aspiring. ~ Alexis De Tocqueville

What the Latins have done in this text (1 John v, 7) the Greeks have done to Paul (1 Tim. iii, 16). They now read, "Great is the mystery of godliness; God manifest in the flesh"; whereas all the churches for the first four or five hundred years, and the authors of all the ancient versions, Jerome as well as the rest, read, "Great is the mystery of godliness, which was manifest in the flesh." Our English version makes it yet a little stronger. It reads, "Great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifest in the flesh." ~ Isaac Newton

I've had a dozen novels published and have made far more than a dozen mistakes. Which is why Randy Susan Meyers and I wrote a guidebook to help authors avoid making our mistakes. ~ M.J. Rose

The truth is that good fantasies carefully limit the magic that's possible. In fact, the magic has to be defined, at least in the author's mind, as a whole new set of natural laws that cannot be violated during the course of the story. That is, if at the beginning of the story you have established that your hero can make only three wishes, you better not have him come up with a fourth wish to save his neck right at the end. That's cheating, and your reader will be quite correct to throw your book across the room and carefully avoid anything you ever write in the future. All speculative fiction stories have to create a strange world and introduce the reader to it - but good fantasy must also establish a whole new set of natural laws, explain them right up front, and then faithfully abide by them throughout. ~ Orson Scott Card

I liked reading and working out my ideas in the midst of that endless crowd walking in and out of the (library) looking for something. I, too, was seeking fame and fortune by sitting at the end of a long golden table next to the sets of American authors on the open shelves. ~ Alfred Kazin

Quit smoking in the hope of growing old. It takes a long time to write. People go to books for wisdom and older authors tend to have more of it. ~ Barbara Kingsolver

To find the best authors," he boasted, "is like being able to tell good wine without the labels. ~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

By aspiring to join the mainstream rather than figuring out the ways we need to change it, we risk loosing our gay and lesbian souls in order to gain the world. ~ Urvashi Vaid

A demon, who serves to a warlock, begins tormenting his master, if he has not enough work. Talent is the demon. ~ Lara Biyuts

Whenever I've had to tamper with history for plot purposes, I make sure to mention that in my author's note, and I try to keep such tampering to a bare minimum. I also attempt to keep my characters true to their historical counterparts. This is not always possible, of course. ~ Sharon Kay Penman