Author Tract/Quotes

Thompson: It's the Rapture, Shauna, the Rapture! The virtuous have gone to Heaven, and the rest of us have been... left below! We were fools! And because we rejected God, tacitly accepting Satan, we must suffer through the Apocalypse.
Dalai Lama: I thought all religions were a path to God; I was wrong!
Scientist: Why did I put my faith in science and technology?

Homosexual: Oh, why did I choose to be gay?

—The Simpsons, "Thank God It's Doomsday"

The most pitiable of all silly novels by lady novelists are what we may call the oracular species -- novels intended to expound the writer's religious, philosophical, or moral theories. There seems to be a notion abroad among women, rather akin to the superstition that the speech and actions of idiots are inspired, and that the human being most entirely exhausted of common sense is the fittest vehicle of revelation. To judge from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and speculative questions. Apparently, their recipe for solving all such difficulties is something like this: Take a woman's head, stuff it with a smattering of philosophy and literature chopped small, and with false notions of society baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every day, and serve up hot in feeble English, when not required. You will rarely meet with a lady novelist of the oracular class who is diffident of her ability to decide on theological questions -- who has any suspicion that she is not capable of discriminating with the nicest accuracy between the good and evil in all church parties -- who does not see precisely how it is that men have gone wrong hitherto -- and pity philosophers in general that they have not had the opportunity of consulting her. Great writers, who have modestly contented themselves with putting their experience into fiction, and have thought it quite a sufficient task to exhibit men and things as they are, she sighs over as deplorably deficient in the application of their powers

—George Eliot, Silly Novels by Lady Novelists

Frankly when the writer himself has such obvious scorn for the 'villians', it's difficult for me to understand how he can be outraged people find the story lacking in tension.

—Stark, a StarDestroyer.Net user, referring to The Salvation War

Audiences don't hate diverse characters.
What they hate is being slammed as bigots for rejecting bad work from pretentious, unskilled activists posing as writers.
If the demography of your characters becomes more important than the story, your story will probably suck.

—Clifton Duncan, on twitter