Author's Intention Quotes

When people say they write for themselves, that's probably what they do. I will admit that I don't write for myself; I write to be read. I've got the reader in my mind all the time.

When I imagine my viewer - and it sounds saccharine - but it's a family thing. People in line for my books came as families.

I've been asked this question so many times, do you feel you need to write a book for adults? No, I don't need to write a book for adults.

Kafka is not interested in documenting the manners and mores of any particular place; he is not interested in probing the psyche of individual characters.

But whether thus submissively or not, at least be sure that you go to the author to get at his meaning, not to find yours.

I am not political. It is not my job. But I would be happy if politicians could read my work and draw some conclusions from it.

He was too young to know that, in any novel with a reasonable amount of forethought, there were no coincidences.

There was a different ending to 'New Moon' originally. It was a much quieter book. It was very much all in Bella's head.

I have just finished my novel (rough draft). It is to be called 'Anacoluthon.' This will make the public think it is an historical romance.

Every book is three books, after all; the one the writer intended, the one the reader expected, and the one that casts its shadow when the first two meet by moonlight.

We can never know that a piece of writing is bad unless we have begun by trying to read it as if it was very good and ended by discovering that we were paying the author an undeserved compliment.

Most critics don't realize that a novel like One Hundred Years of Solitude is a bit of a joke, full of signals to close friends; and so, with some pre-ordained right to pontificate they take on the responsibility of decoding the book and risk making terrible fools of themselves.

The Author's Way of sending forth his Second Part of the Pilgrim. Some things are of that nature as to make One's fancy chuckle, while his heart doth ache.

My children haven't read 'Winter Journal'. They have read some of my work, but I really don't foist it on them. I want them to be free to discover it in their own good time. I think reading an intimate memoir by your father - or an intimate autobiographical work, whatever we want to call this thing - you have to come at it at the right moment, so I'm certainly not foisting it upon them.

You don't want people to think you're just writing stories for children about a pig in a tutu.

Although I write to entertain, and try to keep my work free of didacticism, I do have a rather passionate belief in our need to be connected to - and to learn from - history.

Well, I hate it when authors come into a school and they say to kids, 'Write from your heart, only write what you know, and write from your heart.' I hate that because it's useless. I've written over 300 books - not one was written from my heart. Not one. They were all written for an audience, they were all written to entertain a certain audience.

I have no objection to well-written romance, but I'd read enough of it to know that that's not what I had written. I also knew that if it was sold as romance I'd never be reviewed by the 'New York Times' or any other literarily respectable newspaper - which is basically true, although the 'Washington Post' did get round to me eventually.

What I regretted in La Nausee was not to have put myself completely into the thing. I remained outside my hero's disease, protected by my neurosis which, through writing, gave me happiness.

I'm quite sure Shakespeare enjoyed writing Iago much more than he did writing Othello. If you write about someone you love, what the hell are you supposed to say about that person? It's much better to have something between you and your main character that grates.

Sometimes when reading Goethe I have the paralyzing suspicion that he is trying to be funny.

That's why I haven't been so anxious. But now, lots of people write and say, 'I want to find out what you're doing.' So I know that this book will enlighten them.

When I wrote the first [Bond novel] in 1953, I wanted Bond to be an extremely dull, uninteresting man to whom things happened... when I was casting around for a name for my protagonist I thought by God, [James Bond] is the dullest name I ever heard.

A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.

No, actually 'The Host' was totally a palate-cleanser for me. I wanted to do something a little bit different than romantic love. Romantic love is in there, obviously, because I enjoy writing about that and living it a lot.