Yquotes.com

 

You write a book like that that you're fond of over the years, then you see that happen to it, it's like pissing in your father's beer.
--
Statement after seeing David O. Selznick's remake of A Farewell to Arms (1957).

 

Ernest Hemingway

» Ernest Hemingway - all quotes »

Similar quotes

 

You learn about life by the accidents you have, over and over again, and your father is always in your head when that stuff happens. Writing, most of the time, for most people, is an accident and your father is there for that, too. You know, I taught writing for a while and whenever somebody would tell me they were going to write about their dad, I would tell them they might as well go write about killing puppies because neither story was going to work. It just doesn't work. Your father won't let it happen.

 

Kurt Vonnegut

 

Back at the Philadelphia Worldcon (which seems a million years ago), I announced the famous five-year gap: I was going to skip five years forward in the story, to allow some of the younger characters to grow older and the dragons to grow larger, and for various other reasons. I started out writing on that basis in 2001, and it worked very well for some of my myriad characters but not at all for others, because you can't just have nothing happen for five years. If things do happen you have to write flashbacks, a lot of internal retrospection, and that's not a good way to present it. I struggled with that essentially wrong direction for about a year before finally throwing it out, realizing there had to be another interim book. That became A Feast for Crows, where the action is pretty much continuous from the preceding book. Even so, that only accounts for one year. Why the four after that? I don't know, except that this was a very tough book to write -- and it remains so, because I've only finished half. Going in, I thought I could do something about the length of the second book in the series, A Clash of Kings, roughly 1,200 pages in manuscript. But I passed that and there was a lot more to write. Then I passed the length of the third book, A Storm of Swords, which was something like 1,500 pages in manuscript and gave my publishers all around the world lots of production problems. I didn't really want to make any cuts because I had this huge story to tell. We started thinking about dividing it in two and doing it as A Feast for Crows, Parts One and Two, but the more I thought about that the more I really did not like it. Part One would have had no resolution whatsoever for 18 viewpoint characters and their 18 stories. Of course this is all part of a huge megaseries so there is not a complete resolution yet in any of the volumes, but I try to give a certain sense of completion at the end of each volume -- that a movement of the symphony has wrapped up, so to speak.

 

George R. R. Martin

 

Father was moved to Hung Nam which was quite far from Pyongyang, together with that Mr. Kim. Father was taken to the police station on February 22nd, 1948 and was sentenced to five years' imprisonment at the trial of April 7th. He moved to Hung Nam on May 20th. He found there that many prisoners were dying because of the poor food. The hard, forced labor raised the death rate. Father felt that he would not be able to survive for five years when he saw the contents of the meals. Father knew that Heavenly Father had worked on the Providence for 6,000 years, looking for one person: Father. (Father always thought of what would happen to Heavenly Father, who had worked His Providence for 6,000 years, if Father died.) You can imagine how difficult the mission of the Messiah is if I tell you this story. Father himself knew more than anyone else the difficulty of the Messiah's mission. Once he wondered whether he could transfer the mission to anybody else or not. If he could have transferred it, he himself might have found things easier, but that person would have had to walk the difficult way that Father was walking. So he changed his mind again and decided that he would like to bear the cross, rather than make someone else go this difficult course.

 

Sun Myung Moon

 

Nobody has to read this book. Nobody has to pick it up. Nobody has to open it. And if you open it and read it, you don't have to like it. And if you read it and you dislike it, you don't have to remain silent about it. You can write to me, you can complain about it, you can write to the publisher, you can write to the papers, you can write your own book. You can do all those things, but there your rights stop. No one has the right to stop me writing this book. No one has the right to stop it being published, or bought, or sold or read.

 

Philip Pullman

 

You see this book is finished and it is a bad book and I must get rid of it. It can't be printed. It is bad because it isn't honest. Oh! the incidents all happened but —  I'm not telling as much of the truth about them as I know. In satire you have to restrict the picture and I just can't do satire. I've written three books now that were dishonest because they were less than the best that I could do. One you never saw because I burned it the day I finished it. … My whole work drive has been aimed at making people understand each other and then I deliberately write this book, the aim of which is to cause hatred through partial understanding. My father would have called it a smart-alec book. It was full of tricks to make people ridiculous. If I can't do better I have slipped badly. And that I won't admit — yet.

 

John Steinbeck