Popular quotes about Author! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 12
When it comes to memoir, we want to catch the author in a lie. When we read fiction, we want to catch the author telling the truth.
Tayari JonesThe stories I love the most are where the author has a lot of empathy for everyone. The author loves their characters and takes their situations really seriously, and you feel like you're just dropped into a different world.
Molly AntopolThe Internet obviously changes things; we've seen that in the music industry above all else. As an author, I'm now having to deal with the fact that it's happening in the publishing industry as well. And publishing is going through a very difficult time. Some view it as positive, some negative, but nobody really knows how to deal with it. If you're an author it looks very challenging because your work can be pirated so easily and there's very little you can do about it.
Misha GlennyIt is (to describe it figuratively) as if an author were to make a slip of the pen, and as if this clerical error became conscious of being such. Perhaps this was no error but in a far higher sense was an essential part of the whole exposition. It is, then, as if this clerical error were to revolt against the author, out of hatred for him, were to forbid him to correct it, and were to say, "No, I will not be erased, I will stand as a witness against thee, that thou art a very poor writer."
Soren KierkegaardWhy do you keep reading a book? Usually to find out what happens. Why do you give up and stop reading it? There may be lots of reasons. But often the answer is you don't care what happens. So what makes the difference between caring and not caring? The author's cruelty. And the reader's sympathy...it takes a mean author to write a good story.
Gail Carson LevineHere's what I think: the best author photo ever taken is the author photo of you holding your extra-large engulfing rabbit and looking straight at the camera. I never hope to have one so good. The only way I guess it could be any more literary is if the rabbit were smoking a Gauloise and drinking a tiny cup of coffee.
Patricia LockwoodHollywood, to hear some writers tell it, is the place where they take an author's steak tartare and make cheeseburger out of it. Upon seeing the film, they say, the author promptly cuts his throat, bleeding to death in a pool of money.
Fletcher KnebelFiction should be about moral dilemmas that are so bloody difficult that the author doesn't know the answer. What I hate in fiction is when the author knows better than the characters what they should do.
Pat BarkerComputers will have to learn that when I quote from some old author who spelled differently from the machine, the wishes of the long-dead author will have to be respected, and the machine will have to mind its manners
Robertson DaviesNobody is the author or producer of his own life story ... somebody began it and is its subject in the twofold sense, namely, its actor and sufferer ... but nobody is the author.
Hannah ArendtThose who believe the Author of Nature to be also the Author of Scripture must expect to find in Scripture the same sorts of difficulties that they find in Nature.
OrigenIf the poem can be improved by the author's explanations, it never should have been published.
Archibald MacLeishWe read privately, mentally listening to the author's voice and translating the writer's thoughts. The book remains static and fixed; the reader journeys through it.
Lynne TrussGenerally speaking, an author's style is a faithful copy of his mind. If you would write a lucid style, let there first be light in your own mind; and if you would write a grand style, you ought to have a grand character.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheThe reason the middle section switches to third person is, well, this is middle age. This is the part in her life where she loses track of something that was driving her and has to figure out what's going to drive the next part of her mission, this mission to be an author. I had to push back away from her for a while before we could come up to that really lyrical close third in the final section.
Danielle DuttonIf modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.
Sarah FieldingI suppose if I was to have to pick a few, Ursula LeGuin would have to top the list. It was while reading her work that I decided I wanted to be an author.
Sarah ZettelThe Bible is one story that unfolds in one book, by one author, about one subject. A story that moves from promise to fulfillment.
Alistair BeggThe author's mentor advises the NAKED method of breaking the ice at the first meeting: Name, Address, Kin, Experience, and Dreams.
Kevin RooseCertain I am that every author who has written a book with earnest forethought and fondly cherished designs will bear testimony to the fact that much which he meant to convey has never been guessed at in any review of his work; and many a delicate beauty of thought, on which he principally valued himself, remains, like the statue of Isis, an image of truth from which no hand lifts the veil.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonI like films about people who figured out what they believed and had the guts to act on it in a way that added value to others. So, there are lots of movies that have characters who did that. I'll pick an odd one - Stranger Than Fiction because I really liked the movie - particularly the offbeat cookie maker. You'll have to see the movie to see what I mean. The movie also reinforces that you can be the author of your own script.
Robert S. KaplanTo translate, one must have a style of his own, for the translation will have no rhythm or nuance, which come from the process of artistically thinking through and molding the sentences; they cannot be reconstituted by piecemeal imitation. The problem of translation is to retreat to a simpler tenor of oneโs own style and creatively adjust this to oneโs author.
Paul GoodmanA fine lady; by which term I wish to express the result of that perfect education in taste and manner, down to every gesture, which heaven forbid that I, professing to be a poet, should undervalue. It is beautiful, and therefore I welcome it in the name of the author of all beauty. I value it so highly that I would fain see it extend not merely from Belgravia to the tradesman's villa, but thence, as I believe it one day will, to the laborer's hovel and the needlewoman's garret.
Charles KingsleyFairfield Porter who has been my model for art writing all along, said that if the most interesting thing about a work of art is its content, it's probably a failure. I think it's true that if you find yourself thinking about the meaning in an author's message, it's probably not very interesting as art. Obviously, this is a tough concept, because if you withdraw intention.
David SalleThe attitude of, I will never self-publish, coming from any author, indicates that they have never been in a position where it is their only option.
Jennifer ArmintroutI think I give far more space and play to avant-garde writing than any other contemporary textbook author. I want students to be able to decide for themselves which aesthetics are closest to their own. Still, while I try not to be a nostalgist myself, I suppose I am drawn to those poignant moments in our lives, rendered clearly and artfully.
David StarkeyCertainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.
Arthur MillerAnyone buying this book is going to be out a tidy sum if he is sucked in by the title. I wish I could write a real sexy book that would be barred from the mails. Apparently nothing whets a reader's appetite for literature more than the news that the author has been thrown into a federal pokey for disturbing the libido of millions of Americans.
Groucho MarxIt is the glorious doom of literature that the evil perishes and the good remains. Even when the original author of some healthy and useful truth is forgotten, the truth survives, transplanted to works more calculated to purify it from error, and perpetuate it to our benefit.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron LyttonReading is a majority skill but a minority art. Yet nothing can replace the exact, complicated, subtle communion between absent author and entranced, present reader.
Julian BarnesThe liberty, prosperity, and the happiness of our country will always be the object of my most fervent prayers to the Supreme Author of All Good.
James MonroeIf I become the most popular author in jump, please give me the right to end one manga I hate.
Tsugumi OhbaI can still remember the miraculous feeling of writing a sentence, then more sentences, telling a story. The first thing I wrote was a one-page summary of Robinson Crusoe and I am so sorry I do not have it any more; it was at that moment I became an author.
Henning MankellMy interest in science was excited at age nine by an article on astronomy in National Geographic; the author was Donald Menzel of the Harvard Observatory. For the next few years, I regularly made star maps and snuck out at night to make observations from a locust tree in our back yard.
Dudley R. HerschbachI know a movie and a book are two different things and you are going do different media in different ways. No author can want a movie to be exactly like the book because then it will be a bad movie.
Katherine PatersonIt has been jestingly said that the works of John Paul Richter are almost unintelligible to any but the Germans, and even to some of them. A worthy German, just before Richter's death, edited a complete edition of his works, in which one particular passage fairly puzzled him. Determined to have it explained at the source, he went to John Paul himself. The author's reply was very characteristic: "My good friend, when I wrote that passage, God and I knew what it meant; it is possible that God knows it still; but as for me, I have totally forgotten."
Jean PaulIt is difficult to get men to pick up a female author. Women will read men, but men won't read women.
Lisa GardnerGod is the foundation of all authority, He exercises that foundation because He is the author and the owner of His creation. He is the foundation upon which all other authority stands or falls.
R. C. SproulThe Physician, by the study and inspection of urine and ordure, approves himself in the science; and in like sort should our author accustom and exercise his imagination upon the dregs of nature.
Alexander PopeIn order that knowledge may not run riot, the author of the Gita has insisted on devotion accompanying it and has given it the first place.
Mahatma GandhiBecoming an author changes your attitude too. Once you see where books come from, and how they're made, they never seem quite as sacred again.
Lev GrossmanBecause he is; that is, because he is an infinitely glorious, good, wise, holy, powerful, righteous, self-subsisting , self-sufficient , and all-sufficient being; the fountain and author of all being and good; the first cause, last end, and sovereign Lord of all; therefore, he is to be worshipped: therefore, are we to admire, adore, and love him; to praise, to trust and to fear him.
John Owen