Dick Bruna Quotes

Readers are always surprised to learn that authors have little or no input regarding the cover art for their books.

Everything is different - except for publishing itself: getting hold of an amazing author, working to make his or her book the best and best-looking it can be, telling the world.

Making a book is a craft, like making a clock; it needs more than native wit to be an author.

Publishing a book is a very different thing than writing one.

Bantam has an incredible team working on my books, and I'm so thrilled that the art department is so amazing, since those covers are the 'face' of my stories!

The craft of writing is all the stuff that you can learn through school; go to workshops and read books. Learn characterization, plot and dialogue and pacing and word choice and point of view. Then there's also the art of it which is sort of the unknown, the inspiration, the stuff that is noncerebral.

I could name you a dozen superheroes whose powers I'd like to have. But if I could have any power in the world, it would be the power to read or watch a creative work and absorb the technical skill of the people who made it. Because then I could have even more fun writing. That's my core identity. I'm a writer. I just love telling stories.

I enjoy looking at words on paper and visualizing how to make them come to life. As a director, the creative process is really amazing.

I must write the book out in my head now, before I sit down.

It's my job to write the best book I can each month and hand my scripts in. Everything else is beyond my control.

I love writing. It's one of my favorite jobs. Of the things I get to do, I love sitting in a room and coming up with ideas, and I love going home and pounding them out.

I have no favourite genre or style but treat each novel with the same care, imagination and craftsmanship. It's as difficult to write a crime or a children's novel with a touch of style and grace as it is a literary novel.

I just come up with the stories and write them as well as I can. There's not really a great deal of strokey-beard thinking going on.

It takes me a very, very long time to write a story, to write a piece of fiction, whatever you call the fiction that I write. I just go about it blindly, feeling my way towards what it has to be.

I have to go make books. Sorry about that.

In a mood of faith and hope my work goes on. A ream of fresh paper lies on my desk waiting for the next book. I am a writer and I take up my pen to write.

Publishing in a way doesn't have a lot to do with writing, and writing doesn't have a lot to do with publishing.

I've never envied the person who had to put my books together in one script.

Books are acts of composition: you compose them. You make music: the music is called fiction.

I grew up around books. When I first held the book and it was a substantive, tangible thing, and I thought of all the work that went into it, not just my work but everybody else's and the research and so forth, there's a sense of really have done something worthwhile.

There's a lot more to publishing a book than writing it and slapping a cover on it.

Writing a book is a very lonely business. You are totally cut off from the rest of the world, submerged in your obsessions and memories.

Art is solace; art is vision, and when I pick up a literary work, I am a consumer of literature for its own sake.

I guess there's a sort of cycle with writing books. There's all the researching and then the imagining and writing - which is the real job - and then there's always a period when the book comes out and you have to lift your head and venture out.

Once I have the story in my head, I write it down. The illustrations usually come last.