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"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens."
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"We are the products of editing, rather than of authorship."
"But isn't it true that an author can write only about himself?"
"Many of the characters are fools and they're always playing tricks on meand treating me badly."
"I have a handful of prayers that I pray all the time... One is that God will put my books into the right hands at the right times. I've prayed this prayer thousands of times, and God has answered it in dramatic fashion countless times. The right book in the right hands at the right time can save a marriage, avert a mistake, demand a decision, plant a seed, conceive a dream, solve a problem, and prompt a prayer. That is why I write. And that's why, for me, a book sold is not a book sold; a book sold is a prayer answered. I don't know the name and situation of every reader, but God does, and that's all that matters."
"The first book I did - the first successful book - was a kind of a travel book, and publishers in Britain encouraged me to do more."
"A third...candidate for Shakespearean authorship was Christopher Marlowe. He was the right age (just two months older than Shakespeare), had the requisite talent, and would certainly have had ample leisure after 1593, assuming he wasn't too dead to work."
"The one thing which seems to me quite impossible is to take into consideration the kind of book one is expected to, surely one can only write the book that is there to be written."
"A lot of people who read my novel 'Smog City' ask me why I never killed off either of the two main characters. To be honest, it's because I've given them life. Not literally of course, but since I spent so much time developing and creating my characters, they've ended up with complex personalities, in fact they're almost sentient in a way, and to write them off as dead would be like killing a close friend to me."
"Authors, he thought. Even the sane ones are nuts."
"We write every day, we fight every day, we think and scheme and dream a little dream every day. manuscripts pile up in the kitchen sink, run-on sentences dangle around our necks. we plant purple prose in our gardens and snip the adverbs only to thread them in our hair. we write with no guarantees, no certainties, no promises of what might come and we do it anyway. this is who we are."
Explore more quotes by Malcolm Cowley
"Be kind and considerate with your criticism... It's just as hard to write a bad book as it is to write a good book."
"They tell you that you'll lose your mind when you grow older. What they don't tell you is that you won't miss it very much."
"Authors are sometimes like tomcats: They distrust all the other toms but they are kind to kittens."
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