A Quote by Celeste Ng
Buying new books supports the writer by providing both a royalty and an audience; a writer whose book sells well has a better chance of selling another.
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I think that any writer who is commercial, who sells a lot of books, has to face criticism. Because the more hermetic and the more difficult your book is, supposedly it's better.
But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer's soul.
I probably am a cranky writer, but I am actually a fairly nice, normal person. Since I'm a grouchy writer, of course I have friends whose books are doing way better than mine.
I've never translated more than one book by any author. But I'm fascinated by translators who have, like Richard Zenith, who's translated so much of Fernando Pessoa's work. I get restless for a new kind of influence. The books I've translated are books I want to learn from as a writer, to be intoxicated by. And translation is an act of writing in itself. It's an act of recreation - of a writer's cadence and tone and everything that distinguishes the voice in the book.
I love real books, paper books, but I also love buying online, and I think that people are more willing to take a chance to read something if it's cheaper - sometimes books on the Kindle are $6. A hardback book is $25. For $25, it better be a really great book. Or you're going to be mad.
A man can write one book that can be great, but this doesn't make him a great writer-just the writer of a great book. . . I think a writer has to extend very widely, as well as plunge very deep, to be a great novelist.
At Knopf, we look at each book on a case-by-case basis... in some cases, we think a writer might get a boost from an endorsement by a fellow writer, but in other cases, a new book will be better served by other means, such as publicity and reviews.
I feel when a writer treats a character as 'precious,' the writer runs the risk of turning them into a comic book character. There's nothing wrong with comic book characters in comic books, but I don't write comic books.
'Would I mind if someone wrote a sequel to one of my books?' I asked myself, and I decided that I wouldn't, providing that the writer was respectful, had read my book first, and wasn't drunk when doing it.
For a writer, the Book Festival is interesting because you bump into all these other writers whose work you know, whose names you know, and you have a chance to put a person with the name and the work.
By the time I get through writing a score, I know the book better than the book writer does, because I've examined every word, and questioned the book writer on every word.
People nowadays interchange gifts and favors out of friendship, but buying and selling is considered absolutely inconsistent with the mutual benevolence which should prevail between citizens and the sense of community of interest which supports our social system. According to our ideas, buying and selling is essentially anti-social in all its tendencies. It is an education in self-seeking at the expense of others, and no society whose citizens are trained in such a school can possibly rise above a very low grade of civilization
That underscored this idea that when we're reading a book or writing a book, you're in an act of co-creation. The reader and the writer are both trying to dress up and present their best selves and then there's that moment, when suddenly, as a reader, you're not exactly you anymore, and likewise, as a writer, you're not really you.
The people who review my books, generally, are kind of youngish culture writers who aspire to write books. When someone writes a book review, they obviously already self-identify as a writer. I mean, they are. They're writers, they're critics, and they're writing about a book about a writer who's a critic. So I think it's really hard for people to distance themselves from what they're criticizing.
The thing is - do we really need another writer who writes a book every eighteen months, whether the quality is wonderful or not? I mean, maybe. But I can name twenty off the top of my head who do it. Maybe what we need is a writer like me who goes very slow, as well.
I have a problem with writer/directors, personal. I can't work well with both of them on the set, if both of them are giving instructions. Writers tend to be in love with what they wrote. You can't always translate the words into the meaning, sometimes the meaning is better served without the words, difficult to make a writer to try to understand that. It gets, sometimes, tense.
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