Alan Dean Foster Quotes

To me, a book is a book. A novel is a novel, and you have hundreds of possibilities, options, and they may all be fine. Charles Dickens or Ingeborg Bachmann, Claude Simon or later writers. The one and only condition is that it has to be good: it has to have quality, substance, atmosphere.

I shall never be ashamed of citing a bad author if the line is good.

Read good books. Read bad books - and figure out why you don't like them. Then don't do it when you write. If you are a science fiction or fantasy writer, going to conventions and attending panels is very useful.

Dostoevsky is such a bad writer it is hard to take him seriously as a novelist, though he is a wonderful philosopher.

Sometimes novels are considered 'important' in the way medicine is - they taste terrible and are difficult to get down your throat, but are good for you.

All those people whose faces decorate the shopping bags of Barnes and Noble, with a few exceptions, would never get published today.

I think finally good writing gets out there, and people like it, and bad writing doesn't. Well, no. Bad writing does get out there 'cause some people like it.

For fiction, I'm not particularly nationalistic. I'm not like the Hugo Chavez of Latin American letters, you know? I want people to read good work.

I've spoken out my whole life against the idea of simply dismissing whole areas of fiction by saying it's "genre" and therefore can't be seen as literature.

A good novel doesn't just transcend the boundaries of its target market - it knows nothing about target markets.

I used to be more of a purist about literature. I thought, 'If it's a really propulsive story, then maybe there's something unliterary about it.'

You're not going to make Hemingway better by adding animations.

No highbrow literary type would ever say 'Moby Dick' is good but it's just about a whale, or a Jane Austen would be important if she wasn't just writing about romantic relationships.

We sometimes received - and I would read - 200 manuscripts a week. Some of them were wonderful, some were terrible; most were mediocre. It was like the gifts of the good and bad fairies.

Books are divided into two classes, the books of the hour and the books of all time.

American literature had always considered writing a very serious matter.

The way British publishing works is that you go from not being published no matter how good you are, to being published no matter how bad you are.

I believe that writing is derivative. I think good writing comes from good reading.

In ages past, there was less of a dichotomy between good literature and fun reads. In the twentieth century, I think, it split apart, so that you had serious fiction and genre fiction.

My problem with new writers is that it takes me five or six years to memorise the right names.

I had written a book. For various reasons, the publishing industry had decided that my book was going to be 'important.' The novel had taken me 12-and-a-half years to write, and after being with the book for so long, I had no real perspective on the merits or demerits of what I had written. I hoped it was good, but feared that it wasn't.

I can always tell when I'm about to start writing. I go through cycles in reading. When I'm beginning to start to write something, I start reading what I think of as good literature. I read things with wonderful language.

One of the more interesting things I've learnt since becoming a writer is that if you like the book, you'll generally like the person. It doesn't always work in reverse - there are huge numbers of lovely people out there writing not very good books.

Anyone aspiring to literary greatness should read 'New Grub Street' and weep.

Well, well, Henry James is pretty good, though he is of the nineteenth century, and that glaringly.