Author Skill Quotes

Books are well written, or badly written. That is all.

Master storytellers like Jeffrey Archer and Arthur Hailey use simple language. But they manage to grab the attention of the readers right from page one. I'll consider myself a good storyteller the day people believe it's OK to be late for work or postpone deadlines just to finish reading my book.

I love to read. And right now I'm on my last hundred pages of 'The Corrections' by Jonathan Franzen, and I really enjoyed it. His writing is just - he's one of those writers where you just go, 'There are people just meant to be novel writers.'

Michael Lewis has the amazing ability to take complex formulas and concepts and turn them into page-turners.

[I] am reading No Ordinary Joes. Should have had a medical checkup before I started it. Colton makes us fall in love with these guys, then puts our hearts in harm's way. It's lovely and ghastly and extremely powerful. His best yet.

Good authors, too, who once knew better words now only use four-letter words writing prose... anything goes.

Very wonderful books might be published, and very terrible books might be published.

Truman Capote was a magical, beautiful writer.

Good writers hate bad writing but hating bad writing doesn’t make you good. Writing badly does.

Rex Stout's narrative and dialogue could not be improved, and he passes the supreme test of being rereadable. I don't know how many times I have reread the Wolfe stories, but plenty. I know exactly what is coming and how it is all going to end, but it doesn't matter. That's writing.

The best book of the year, Grobel's writing is quite marvelous. The Hustons reads vividly, just like one of John Huston's great films.

Not everyone writes well from a child's point of view.

Alice Munro can move characters through time in a way that no other writer can.

Maggie Shipstead's prose is so graceful and muscular, so dazzling, so sure-handed and fearless, that at times I had to remind myself to breathe. Astonish Me is a treasure of small surprises.

No one will ever write a fantasy novel better than The Hobbit.

An orator or author is never successful till he has learned to make his words smaller than his ideas.

First, hugely popular and talented romance/dark fantasy author Meljean Brook gives a really deep, wonderful story. She's clearly spent so much time thinking about the world of Sonja and her story in particular, it could easily have been a novel of its own.

Character development is what I value most as a reader of fiction. If an author can manage to create the sort of characters who feel fully real, who I find myself worrying about while I'm walking through the grocery store aisles a week later, that to me is as close to perfection as it gets.

Humans are very complex; I definitely have a new respect for authors that are able to write books nonstop. It's an incredible talent.

I can inhabit any character in a way that is difficult to do successfully in a contemporary novel.

I admire writers such as Elmore Leonard who can nail a character in three or four lines of dialogue, so he doesn't need pages of back story or clumsy exposition.

The opening lines of a book are so important. You really need to somehow charm your reader. If you can't get her attention in the first pages, you may have lost her. There has to be an ambience.

Damn the subjunctive. It brings all our writers to shame.

The ambition of 'Ten Thousand Saints,' Eleanor Henderson's debut novel about a group of unambitious lost souls, is beautiful. In nearly 400 pages, Henderson does not hold back once: she writes the hell out of every moment, every scene, every perspective, every fleeting impression, every impulse and desire and bit of emotional detritus.

What 'Floating Worlds' does draw on is Holland's artistry in bringing the past to life in her historical fiction and depicting the people who inhabited that past.