Popular quotes about Author! Wisdom and inspiration are here! | page 12
The twentieth century saw a professionalization of fiction writing, particularly in its second half and particularly in the Anglo-Saxon world - not so much mainland Europe, for example. This professionalization is a tragedy. Hand in hand with this - and I have no idea what the causal relations are - there has been a rise in the idea of The Author, so that today one often has the impression that what's selling the book is not the book but the author.
Zia Haider RahmanThe author creates a book and the people accept or not accept it. The creator of a book is an author and the creator of it`s fate are people.
Victor HugoPoets can tell the truth as they see it. Itโs the authorโs story, the authorโs voice.
Nikki GiovanniI don't think that children, if left to themselves, feel that there is an author behind a book, a somebody who wrote it. Grown-ups have fostered this quotient of identity, particularly teachers. Write a letter to your favorite author and so forth. When I was a child I never realized that there were authors behind books. Books were there as living things, with identities of their own.
P. L. TraversYouโve thrown down the gauntlet. Youโve brought my wrath down upon your house. Now, to prove that I exist I must kill you. As the child outlives the father, so must the character bury the author. If you are, in fact, my continuing author, then killing you will end my existence as well. Small loss. Such a life, as your puppet, is not worth living. Butโฆ If I destroy you and your dreck script, and I still existโฆ then my existence will be glorious, for I will become my own master.
Chuck PalahniukA reader kindly pointed out to me recently that most of the quotes I include are by men. And it's true. Personally, I don't even consider whether the author is male or female, nor even care much who the author is - what's significant is the message. Of course, women are equally capable of great insights, however in our culture it's not so long ago that women could not even be published
Charlotte BronteIf someone writes a great story, people praise the author, not the pen. People don't say, 'Oh what an incredible pen...where can I get a pen like this so I can write great stories?' Well, I am just a pen in the hands of the Lord. He is the author. All praise should go to him.
Keith GreenIt is the shared experience - [although] you're the conduit of the sound, the recipient is also in some way the author of the work, because if they weren't the author of the work they wouldn't be able to recognise it as an experience, you could argue. The more distance you can put between yourself and having any kind of objective the more likely it is to appear.
Daniel O'SullivanMy favorite anything is always relative to the context of present time, place and mood. When I finish a book and want to immediately find another by the same author and no other, that author is elevated to my favorite.
Amy TanTo ask an author who hopes to be a serious writer if his work is autobiographical is like asking a spider where he buys his thread. The spider gets his thread right out of his own guts, and that is where the author gets his writing.
Robertson DaviesThere is no obligation for the author of a film to believe in, or to sympathise with, the moral behaviour of his characters. Nor is he necessarily to be accredited with the same opinions as his characters. Nor is it necessary or obligatory for him to believe in the tenet of his construction - all of which is a disclaimer to the notion that the author of Drowning by Numbers believes that all men are weak, enfeebled, loutish, boorish and generally inadequate and incompetent as partners for women. But it's a thought.
Peter GreenawayIt is always dishonest for a reviewer to review the author instead of the author's book.
Edward AbbeyI have been told by hospital authorities that more copies of my works are left behind by departing patients than those of any other author.
Robert BenchleyThe reason why so few good books are written is, that so few people that can write know anything. In general an author has always lived in a room, has read books, has cultivated science, is acquainted with the style and sentiments of the best authors, but he is out of the way of employing his own eyes and ears. He has nothing to hear and nothing to see. His life is a vacuum.
Walter BagehotI think I'm way too much of a control freak to co-author anything with anyone. I have a hard enough time writing with myself! I admire people that can do it, but it's not for me.
Sarah DessenIf at times I have thought myself unfortunate, it is because of a confusion, an error. I have mistaken myself for someone else... Who am I really? I am the author of The World as Will and Representation, I am the one who has given an answer to the mystery of Being that will occupy the thinkers of future centuries. That is what I am, and who can dispute it in the years of life that still remain for me?
Arthur SchopenhauerWhatever an author puts between the two covers of his book is public property; whatever of himself he does not put there is his private property, as much as if he had never written a word.
Mary Abigail DodgeSometimes the reader will decide something else than the author's intent; this is certainly true of attempts to empirically decipher reality.
John M. FordIf modesty and candor are necessary to an author in his judgment of his own works, no less are they in his reader.
Sarah FieldingIf I want to be the sexy Bipasha Basu, then I'll do a song here or a glam role there. But I want to be part of films that are watched, films that earn money and are new age, with author-backed roles.
Bipasha BasuA book becomes a mirror, with the author's face shining over it. Talent only gives an imperfect image,--the broken glimmer of a countenance. But the features of genius remain unruffled. Time guards the shadow. Beauty, the spiritual, Venus,--whose children are the Tassos, the Spensers, the Bacons,--breathes, the magic of her love, and fixes the face forever.
Robert Aris WillmottI think I have done well, if I have acquired a new word from a good author; and my business with him is to find my own, though itwere only to melt him down into an epithet or an image for daily use.
Ralph Waldo EmersonIn January 1962, when I was the author of one and a half unperformed plays, I attended a student production of 'The Birthday Party' at the Victoria Rooms in Bristol. Just before it began, I realised that Harold Pinter was sitting in front of me.
Tom StoppardIt has been said by a distinguished philosopher that England is "usually the last to enter into the general movement of the European mind." The author of the remark probably meant to assert that a man or a system may have become famous on the continent, while we are almost ignorant of the name of the man and the claims of his system. Perhaps, however, a wider range might be given to the assertion. An exploded theory or a disadvantageous practice, like a rebel or a patriot in distress, seeks refuge on our shores to spend its last days in comfort if not in splendour.
Isaac TodhunterAn author is a person who can never take innocent pleasure in visiting a bookstore again.
Roy Blount, Jr.The Bible is actually a library of books-some long, some short- written over hundreds of years by many authors. Behind each one, however, was [the] Author: the Spirit of God.
Billy GrahamMilla Jovovich introduced me to [anthropologist and author of the Don Juan series of books involving shamanic peyote rituals] Carlos Castaneda because I was all into the hallucinogens for a minute.
Michelle RodriguezI am a completely horizontal author. I can't think unless I'm lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch.
Truman CapoteI was shocked at college to see one hundred of my classmates in the library all reading copies of the same book. Instead of doing as they did, I went into the stacks and read the first book written by an author whose name began with Z. I received the highest grade in the class. That convinced me that the institution was not being run correctly. I left.
John CageSome books seem to have been written, not to teach us anything, but to let us know that the author has known something.
Johann Wolfgang von GoetheLife takes its own turns, makes its own demands, writes its own story, and along the way, we start to realize we are not the author.
Barack ObamaYou need to take small steps when you dream big dreams. I am a published author with dyslexia, a professional speaker who was in speech therapy for three years as a child because I had a lisp; and a slow stiff kid from the suburbs who became an All-Pro in the NFL.
Karl MecklenburgI 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 MankellWhen you read a piece of writing that you admire, send a note of thanks to the author.
Sherman AlexieIt is possible to argue that the really influential book is not that which converts ten millions of casual readers, but rather that which converts the very few who, at any given moment, succeed in seizing power. Marx and Sorel have been influential in the modern world, not so much because they were best-sellers (Sorel in particular was not at all a widely read author), but because among their few readers were two men, called respectively Lenin and Mussolini.
Aldous HuxleyThe 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 PopeShakespeare is the true multicultural author. He exists in all languages. He is put on the stage everywhere. Everyone feels that they are represented by him on the stage.
Harold BloomThe two most engaging powers of an author are to make new things familiar, familiar things new.
William Makepeace ThackerayI have preferred to teach my students not English literature but my love for certain authors, or, even better, certain pages, or even better than that, certain lines. One falls in love with a line, then with a page, then with an author. Well, why not? It is a beautiful process.
Jorge Luis BorgesWith the marketing pressures driving the book world today, it's much easier to get the author of a memoir on a television show than a serious novelist.
David HalberstamI can't imagine why everybody is always so keen for authors to talk about writing. I should have thought it was an author's business to write, not talk.
Agatha Christiecoincident with the explosive growth of research, the art of writing science suffered a grave setback, and the stultifying convention descended that the best scientific prose should sound like a non-human author addressing a mechanical reader. ... We injure ourselves when we fail to make our discipline as clear and vibrant as we can to students - prospective scientists - and to the public who pay the taxes.
David Mermin