Authorial Tone Quotes

Shaw writes as if it were always midday.

Certainly 'The Judgment of Paris' was the novel in which I found my own voice.

You have to take pains in a memoir not to hang on the reader's arm, like a drunk, and say, 'And then I did this and it was so interesting.

I get really flowery and verbose in my adult books, but I don't think I dumb down my Y.A. It's just cleaner and more snappy. And the adult books have multiple points-of-view. In my Y.A., it's always third person from the main character's perspective.

I would say that Edgar Allan Poe, [Georges] Perec, Thomas Pynchon, and [Jorge Luis] Borges are all boy-writers. These are writers who take... a kind of demonic joy in writing.

It's funny, because people always say when they meet me, having read me - or they read me, having met me - that they are struck by how the tone is pretty similar, in real life and in the books.

You must find the right voice (or voices) for the timbre that can convince a reader to give himself up to you.

I think Amy Sherman-Palladino has a very specific voice; it's unlike anyone else on television.

The more gifted and talkative one's characters are, the greater the chances of their resembling the author in tone or tint of mind.

I'm open to reading almost anything - fiction, nonfiction - as long as I know from the first sentence or two that this is a voice I want to listen to for a good long while. It has much to do with imagery and language, a particular perspective, the assured knowledge of the particular universe the writer has created.

I write longer sentences than most of the others, maybe because I probably like Henry James more than they do.

I think sometimes writers can get themselves into trouble trying to exert a totally controlled and super-knowing tone. This kind of knowingness is not the most promising tone to be sustained throughout a novel, to have a young woman who understands everybody and is always reading a room perfectly.

For books I want to keep reading, it's definitely the voice. It must be a voice I've never heard before, and it must have its own particular intelligence. By 'voice,' I don't mean vernacular. It has to have its own particular history and world that it inhabits.

I think all writers have a style, a particular voice and rhythm that you have to find.

There are authors like David Foster Wallace or Raymond Chandler - with voice-based authors I might end up a completist, because what I love about them isn't just the particular construction of one novel or another but their flavor. There is an Austrian writer, Thomas Bernhard, as well. One book is not necessarily greater than another book, but they just have this incredible, unique voice, so it doesn't really matter which one you read.

I tried writing adult romances, but it just didn't fit my voice.

All great writers have, of course, an atmosphere in which they seem most at their ease and at their best; a mood of the general mind which they interpret and indeed almost discover, so that we come to read them rather for that than for any story or character or scene of seperate excellence.

I suppose you could say my father's world was Thomas Hardy and my mother's D.H. Lawrence.

... the understatement, the self-ridicule, the delight in the foreignness of foreigners, the complete denial of any attempt to enlist the sympathies of his readers in the hardships he has capriciously invited.

The treasure of a writer is to maintain their own style.

I've never really understood that. It's a funny thing; people sometimes accuse us of condescending to our characters somehow-that to me is kind of inexplicable.

Writers interest me for their style, their obsessions, the ways in which they approach the world.

The tone of every book is slightly different; there's a music that each has that is distinct from all the others.

My mind was, as it were, strongly impregnated with the Johnsonian ether.