Read through the most famous quotes by topic #raf
You are not an "author," you are a writer. If your books are still selling like hotcakes ten years after your demise, THEN you're an author. ↗
In my opinion it is not the writer's job to solve such problems as God, pessimism, etc; his job is merely to record who, under what conditions, said or thought what about God or pessimism. The artist is not meant to be a judge of his characters and what they say; his only job is to be an impartial witness. I heard two Russians in a muddled conversation about pessimism, a conversation that solved nothing; all I am bound to do is reproduce that conversation exactly as I heard it. Drawing conclusions is up to the jury, that is, the readers. My only job is to be talented, that is, to know how to distinguish important testimony from unimportant, to place my characters in the proper light and speak their language. ↗
Chapter one is where you reach out your hand to the reader and say, "Come, let's have an adventure together. ↗
What about his style?" asked Dalgliesh who was beginning to think that his reading had been unnecessarily restricted. "Turgid but grammatical. And, in these days, when every illiterate debutante thinks she is a novelist, who am I to quarrel with that? Written with Fowler on his left hand and Roget on his right. Stale, flat and, alas, rapidly becoming unprofitable..." "What was he like as a person?" asked Dalgliesh. "Oh, difficult. Very difficult, poor fellow! I thought you knew him? A precise, self-opinionated, nervous little man perpetually fretting about his sales, his publicity or his book jackets. He overvalued his own talent and undervalued everyone else's, which didn't exactly make for popularity." "A typical writer, in fact?" suggested Dalgliesh mischievously. ↗
My rule is never save bits. They get the way, and you don't think of anything new. Put 'em in. Make a big mess. ↗
Good or bad, words have an impact on each of us. As a writer, I can only hope that the effects my words have on others are more often good than bad. ↗
There is no bombast, no similes, flowers, digressions, or unnecessary descriptions. Everything tends directly to the catastrophe. ↗
The root difficulty in all cases was the state of being blind and deaf to words-- not seeing the words for the prose. Being adults, they had forgotten what every child understands, which is giving and taking a meaning is not automatic and inevitable ↗
