Literary Control Quotes

I don't believe chance can play a role in my literature.

All the known world, excepting only savage nations, is governed by books.

A dreary censorship, and self-censorship, has been imposed on books by the centralization of the book industry.

Sartre said that wars were acts and that, with literature, you could produce changes in history. Now, I don't think literature doesn't produce changes, but I think the social and political effect of literature is much less controllable than I thought.

I am not in the business of suppressing books.

If we can't stamp out literature in the country, we can at least stop its being brought in from outside.

Slamming the book shut produces a wind on the face, a weather that is copyrighted by the author, and this wind may not be deployed without permission, nor may the pages be turned without express written permission.

Censors are necessary, increasingly necessary, if America is to avoid having a vital literature.

State intervention in the literary realm went far beyond the blue-penciling of texts. It extended to the shaping of literature itself as a force at work throughout the social order. If states wielded such power in the age of print, what will restrain them from abusing it in the age of the Internet?

And must I, perchance, like careful writers, guard myself against the conclusions of my readers?

The M.F.A. is a degree in servitude. It is a way to keep writing safe - to keep reading safe from writing.

For 'The Book Thief,' I wanted only one outcome, and that was for the director to follow his own vision, just as I had.

As much as I really like the screenwriting thing, the novel is where the author has so much control.

Personally I don't like it when writers become excessively proscriptive about the way that people read their books.

Books are an attempt to control something that's uncontrollable.

I like to direct what I write.

I think publishers need to be the ones that publish the books and control that process: finding writers, helping them with their work, finding readers. I think writers need that.

I am a strong believer in the tyranny, the dictatorship, the absolute authority of the writer.

I have always tended toward a lush prose style, but I take care to modulate it from story to story and to strip it down entirely when necessary.

If a parent doesn't want his/her child to read a book then there is always an alternative text to read. But the book banners want to control what every child reads.

In the country of the story the writer is king.

It may be tripe, but it's my tripe - and I do urge other authors to resist encroachments on their brain-children and trust their own judgment rather than that of some zealous meddler with a diploma in creative punctuation who is just dying to get into the act.