Author Recognition Quotes

I thought The Shining was just absolutely wonderful. Stephen King reaches all kinds of people. In the beginning he was just dismissed out of hand, which was terrible.

I met Heinlein after 'The Forever War' had won the Hugo and Nebula Awards. He shook my hand and said he loved the book so much, he'd read it three times.

I have an excellent memory - for books and authors, that is. I remember all the books I've read.

People don't understand how hard it is to get recognized, how hard it is to get people to read your books. How hard it is to get people to even to understand what they're reading when they're talking to you about their books.

So you're the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.

Debut novels are difficult because nobody knows you... they just don't find a huge audience, because that's how the market works.

Readers have a loyalty that cannot be matched anywhere else in the creative arts, which explains why so many writers who have run out of gas can keep coasting anyway, propelled on to the bestseller lists by the magic words AUTHOR OF on the covers of their books.

A lot of people have read the Mira Grant books who are not urban fantasy readers, and they would never have picked up a book with an urban fantasist's name on the cover, but then they go on to read my urban fantasy and like it.

In the '50s, '60s, '70s, before television became easily accessible, even the most well-known writers were not recognised. The writers remained mostly an anonymous lot then.

To be No. 1 on the 'New York Times' best-seller list, well, that's alarming. Having been a stand-up comedian, I think it's surprising to a lot of people that I had the insight I had.

The first thing that put me on the map was my Sherlock Holmes novel.

There is no luck in literary reputation. They who make up the final verdict upon every book are not the partial and noisy readers of the hour when it appears; but a court as of angels, a public not to be bribed, not to be entreated, and not to be overawed, decides upon every man's title to fame.

I think Chris Brown gets kind of dismissed as a gay writer, and I think Chris's books are really, really smart. I wish his books sold a little more widely.

I think they thought it was very arrogant of me to write the end of my seven books series when I didn't have a publisher and no-one had heard of me

If you look at the recent Nobel Prize winners, one couldn't say that the work didn't matter and the political commitment did. Who had ever heard of the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz? He is not politically involved. Octavio Paz is a great poet, also not politically involved. The Nobel Prize is for literature, for the quality of work over the years.

A man of letters, merely by reading a phrase, can estimate exactly the literary merit of its author.

You know, it's a funny thing about writers. Most people don't stop to think of books being written by people much like themselves. They think that writers are all dead long ago--they don't expect to meet them in the street or out shopping. They know their stories but not their names, and certainly not their faces. And most writers like it that way.

I recognize that I'm probably the luckiest novelist in recent memory, because Sherman Alexie, a writer I greatly admire, raved about my book on 'The Colbert Report,' and then Mr. Colbert himself urged his viewers to buy it - on his show and on Twitter.

In my first 15 or 20 years of authorship, I was almost never asked to give a speech or an interview. The written work was supposed to speak for itself, and to sell itself, sometimes even without the author's photograph on the back flap.

I think it's a fallacy to say that a good book sells itself. It doesn't happen. I'm a voracious reader and I can give you a long list of books which should have been best sellers but they aren't. How can you buy a book if you haven't heard of it?

Shirley Jackson enjoyed notoriety and commercial success within her lifetime, and yet it still hardly seems like enough for a writer so singular. When I meet readers and other writers of my generation, I find that mentioning her is like uttering a holy name.

When people come up to me and say, 'I read your book,' I'm thinking, 'How dare you! Who gave you a copy?'

To move up to hardcover is a way of getting more attention for my books. It means a lot to me: It means my books are legitimate.

It's very nice to meet the people who read my books.

In the world of crime novels, the annual Audible Sounds of Crime awards are a pretty big deal, and I was thrilled to be shortlisted for my fifth novel in my bestselling Nic Costa series.