Author's Choice Quotes

Remember that you are an actor in a drama of such sort as the Author chooses: if short, then in a short one; if long, then in a long one. If it be His pleasure that you should enact a poor man, or a cripple, or a ruler, or a private citizen, see that you act it well. For this is your business, to act well the given part. But to choose it belongs to Another.

Remember that you are in actor in a play of such a kind that the author chooses...For this is your duty, to act well the part that is given to you; but to select the part belongs to another.

I don't think age has anything to do with what you write about.

The problem is that in order to publish a book in mainland China, you have to agree to be subject to censorship. That's the nature of the system. I don't challenge that system on its face. It's their system. But as an author, I have a choice to make whether I'll participate or I won't.

As a reader, I'm often put off by authors and story-lines without families or children and all of the angst and joy they bring with them.

I will carry on writing, to be sure. But I don't know if I would want to publish again after Harry Potter.

I always knew from the beginning that this was the only way to write Then We Came To The End - that it had to be in first - person plural if it was going to illustrate how the individual becomes part of the collective. I had no interest in writing the book in a more conventional voice. It goes back to that fascination I had with telling a story in multiple ways. It was the only choice I gave myself, really - I said "This is it, pal. If you can't tell a story this way, you're going to have to abandon the book. Write it this way or give up."

When I began writing in the mid-1960s, I thought it was not important for readers to know whether I was male or female. Also, I was a great admirer of E.B. White, so I may have thought that it would bring me luck to submit my first manuscript as 'E.L.' But if I were starting out today, I would use my first name.

If you're going to write time travel stories, you have to sort of figure out how does time travel work in this particular universe that I'm dealing with.

The first lie of fiction is that the author gives some order to the chaos of life: chronological order, or whatever order the author chooses.

Some reviews give pain. This is regrettable, but no author has the right to whine. He was not obliged to be an author. He invited publicity, and he must take the publicity that comes along.

I had no intention of pursuing either the characters or the setting further.

After I started writing crime fiction, I said to myself, 'I may be limited, but the genre's not. There's no reason to change genres if I'm happy writing what I write.' And I am.

Any setting can be a good setting for a novel.

I decided to write category romance as I'd recently discovered them, and enjoyed them.

Violence is inevitable in crime novels, but there are many different ways to tell a story. I use my characters' reactions to illustrate the worst moments rather than let readers witness them at first hand.

The main advantage of the omniscient approach is that it's the easiest to handle. That's the major reason so many writers select it.

I never talk about books in progress. I could decide to change it to a series of seafood recipes, after all.

'Drawn & Quarterly' has always given me complete editorial control over my books and comics, so any decision about what to include or exclude from the book was my own.

When you write a novel you have to live with the characters for a long time. So I prefer short stories. I never wrote anything more than 250 pages.

Once I left out what I then considered my best line because there was a suspected column rat in the house.

Since I spend such a long time making each book, I only choose books that I'm really interested in and that I really love.

I much prefer writing fiction. History books, for me, are very hard work, very serious.

I guess if one set of my books was selling like Stephen King's, and the other wasn't selling at all, editors would want me to do the ones that sold like Stephen King's. But they seem to be willing to let me pick what I want to do next.

I picked a name that was a combination of an island name and a very English name. Havana was one choice and Dominico was another, but I liked the combination of Jamaica Kincaid.