A Quote by Glen Cook
Books are nothing but repositories for those lies the author wants his reader to believe.
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If a reader likes a particular author, they keep reading all his books, and if the supply is not kept up, then the reader shifts his loyalties.
An author spends months writing a book, and maybe puts his heart's blood into it, and then it lies about unread till the reader has nothing else in the world to do.
The reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.
A reader is doubly guilty of bad manners against an author when he praises his second book at the expense of his first (or vice versa) and then expects the author to be grateful for what he has done.
Unfortunately what is little recognized is that the most worthwhile scientific books are those in which the author clearly indicates what he does not know; for an author most hurts his readers by concealing difficulties.
The so-called paradoxes of an author, to which a reader takes exception, often exist not in the author's book at all, but rather in the reader's head.
Ranganathan's 5 Laws: Books are for use. Books are for all. Every book its reader, or every reader his book. Save the time of the reader. A library is a growing organism.
Every reader, if he has a strong mind, reads himself into the book, and amalgamates his thoughts with those of the author.
Writing is transmogrifying, not just for the reader but also for the author; an author becomes someone he or she isn't by living the lives of his or her characters.
The author always loads his dice, but he must never let the reader see that he has done so, and by the manipulation of his plot, he can engage the reader's attention so that he does not perceive the violence that has been done to him.
an Autobiography is the truest of all books; for while it inevitably consists mainly of extinctions of the truth, shirkings of the truth, partial revealments of the truth, with hardly an instance of plain straight truth, the remorseless truth is there, between the lines, where the author-cat is raking dust upon it which hides from the disinterested spectator neither it nor its smell... the result being that the reader knows the author in spite of his wily diligences.
There's a contract that I make between myself, the author, and the reader. I have to figure out how to give the reader certain powers of recognition, or his own knowledge, his own feelings, but I provide them, so we're working together.
I believe strongly in an author's moral responsibility. But his first obligation is to write good books.
If a secret history of books could be written, and the author's private thoughts and meanings noted down alongside of his story, how many insipid volumes would become interesting, and dull tales excite the reader!
The novel that an author writes is often not the novel that the reader reads, and most of the 'messages' in a novel are put there by the reader. There's nothing wrong with that, of course. That's how literature functions.
The author with the greatest influence on me is my friend Stephen Harrigan, who critiques everything I write before I even bother to show it to my agent or editor. He's a truly great writer - author of Gates of the Alamo and other books you might know of, and his instincts about what's working in a story, and what's not, are just about perfect. My books would be very different without his influence.
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