Author's Voice Quotes

I don't write the same book over and over - I think if I did that, I would stop writing. I couldn't write a series with the same character, and I couldn't write a romance novel over and over again that takes place at a different beach every year. That's not who I am.

I always hope to come up with a style of writing that's appropriate to the material and I felt like this was. And then there's plenty of - I don't know if it's the right word but - lampooning, but it's always at my expense.

I hate to write! But I love to talk, so I'm told that when people read my books, it like I'm there just talking with them.

I think any writer keeps going back to some basic theme. Sometimes it's autobiographical. I guess it usually is.

Norbert Blei is a writer the way people used to be troubadours and minstrels, celebrating what he has seen and heart and felt in a deceptively simple style reminiscent of the early Sherwood Anderson. . . . Like Anderson, he is a lover, and his affection invests his writing with a singular charm.

Editing should be, especially in the case of old writers, a counselling rather than a collaborating task. The tendency of the writer-editor to collaborate is natural, but he should say to himself, 'How can I help this writer to say it better in his own style?' and avoid 'How can I show him how I would write it, if it were my piece?'

Nonfiction is more personal for me. It's more personal in that it's more direct, and actually it's always been more direct, even when I first started doing pieces.

I was probably 35 when I wrote the first story. The voice is kind of a mix in that it has a young voice, but it's also someone who's looking back. I like that kind of double vision.

It's not knowing how to write that makes you interesting, it's what you write.

Not getting bored of my own story and/or character is one of the main struggles I have had with novel writing, and I have put to bed big chunks of work that just didn't sustain my interest.

Royal Young's writing is that rare blend of irony and beauty.

Madame Bovary is myself.

I wrote about my journey through the country of Serbia exactly as I have always written my books, my literature.

I have ventured out and written about real-life experiences that I haven't gone through myself, but I've known people to go through them. In the past, I've always written about my experiences and people related to that, but there's a lot of other things that I've never written about that people have gone through.

Generally, I find that when you're writing and having fun with the writing, that energy and dynamism is going to come out in the text one way or another.

Back in the day, Barry Crump not only had these stories that talked about that kind of rustic personality, but also, he spoke volumes, I guess, of the relationships in the stories that he told in these books.

Each story tells me how to write it, but not the one afterwards.

As Flannery O'Connor says, a person can choose what she writes but she can't choose what she makes live. Some people are really acoustic writers and so for them the secret revision is sound. Other people may revise in terms of the way a paragraph feels. There's a million ways to do it.

The first-person viewpoint is more enjoyable to write, because it lets me meander more freely, and it can reveal more of the character's self-delusions. Really all the advantages are with first-person, so I'm sorry I don't get to pick and choose.

I want to write more, because I think I've got a story to tell.

You develop a style from writing a lot.

Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.

For an author to write as he speaks is just as reprehensible as the opposite fault, to speak as he writes; for this gives a pedantic effect to what he says, and at the same time makes him hardly intelligible.

Every book I write, the first thing I have to do is get into the voice, and the voice varies from book to book - that's part of what's interesting to me.

The idea to make hotel reviews the form of the novel came first. So I just started writing hotel reviews and tried to come up with a consistent voice.