A. E. Hotchner Quotes

Others, amounting to four novels and a mess of short stories which I did not think worth preserving, I have done my best to eliminate from the record by refusing all requests for permission to reprint them, and I hope I have done a good job of making them hard to unearth.

When you publish a book, it's the world's book. The world edits it.

I have a problem with censorship by the lawyer - by legal people by the publishing firm, and I may be changing publishers. They don't seem to want to take too many risks with living people.

The truth is that the writers who most influenced me weren't people categorized as crime writers. I'd say I learned more from John O'Hara, who isn't much read today but whose short stories I really admired, and Hemingway, who I think has lasted pretty good.

For 20 years, Simon & Schuster asked me, 'Why don't you write your autobiography?'

I have a children's book already out and my autobiography.

I still read Hemingway. I still read his short stories because they're so good. He doesn't waste any words.

Once you publish a book, it is out of your control. You cannot dictate how people read it.

There may be a point where I may decide to write an autobiography.

A fictionalised memoir of my father would be a failure as a novel.

I would perhaps like to go back to writing small books about obscure people.

It had never occurred to me to write a historical novel, but then I found Hadley in the pages of Hemingway's 'A Moveable Feast' and wanted to know more about her - who she was, how she and Ernest met and fell in love, what it was like for her to be married to such a demanding and stormy force of nature.

I think people are confusing the right to write with the right to be published.

I wanted to see my name on the cover of a book. If your name is in the Library of Congress, you're immortal.

Whenever anyone calls me 'The new J..K. Rowling,' I think, 'What's wrong with the old one?'

Robert Mapplethorpe asked me to write our story the day before he died. I had never written a book of nonfiction, and so it took me almost two decades to write that book.

What other culture could have produced someone like Hemingway and not seen the joke?

But everything of value about me is in my books.

I'm an avid biography reader.

I want to write books that can truly become a legacy and bring benefits to people.

Insofar as there is an anxiety of influence for a biographer, it may be that each new book is undertaken in reaction to the previous book.

Not too many people know who the editor is.

I'm not about to write my memoirs. Not for a long time.

I don't think anyone should write their autobiography until after they're dead.

Biography is a very definite region bounded on the north by history, on the south by fiction, on the east by obituary, and on the west by tedium