#authors

Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind. ↗

— Ralph Waldo Emerson

#authors #creativity #imagination #imagination

They say your life is either an example or a warning. However, an inspirational writer's life tends to be both. Without our own mistakes, our books would never shed tears or shout Hallelujah. ↗

— Shannon L. Alder

#inspirational-authors #writers #inspirational

Authors always carry a means for scribbling and an excuse for pausing, often inopportunely, to record those fleeting sparks of creative fancy that might otherwise vanish like a wisp in the wind if ignored.  Writing is a jealous and needy lover. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#creativity #inopportunity #jealousy #need #richelle

To say that a writer's hold on reality is tenuous is an understatement-it's like saying the Titanic had a rough crossing. Writer's build their own realities, move into them and occasionally send letters home. The only difference between a writer and a crazy person is that a writer gets paid for it. ↗

— David Gerrold

#the-martian-child #writers #writing #writing-life #life

The only time I've ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn't known that – and I loved the grandeur of the word "diptych". I went around quite snooty for a few days, thinking: "I wrote a diptych." [Colm Tóibín, Novelist – Portrait of the Artist, The Guardian, 19 February 2013] ↗

— Colm Tóibín

#conceit #critique #diptychs #grandeur #novelists

It doesn't have to be dreads. You can wear an Afro, or braids like you used to. There's a lot you can do with natural hair ↗

— Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#black #hair #race #women #nature

There's an epigram tacked to my office bulletin board, pinched from a magazine -- "Wanting to meet an author because you like his work is like wanting to meet a duck because you like pâté. ↗

— Margaret Atwood

#disappointment #epigrams #fandom #on-writing #similes

The greatest good you can do for another is not just share your riches, but to reveal to him his own. ↗

— Benjamin Disraeli

#authority

What I like in a good author is not what he says, but what he whispers. ↗

— Logan Pearsall Smith

#authority

The instruction here is not for every kind of writer - not for the writer of nurse books or thrillers or porno or the cheaper sort of sci-fi - though it is true that what holds for the most serious kind of fiction will generally hold for junk fiction as well. (Not everyone is capable of writing junk fiction: It requires an authentic junk mind. Most creative-writing teachers have had the experience of occasionally helping to produce, by accident, a pornographer. The most elegant techniques in the world, filtered through a junk mind, become elegant junk techniques.) ↗

— John Gardner

#books #craft #craftsmanship #fiction #genre-fiction