Quotes About Author

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.

One thing should be put firmly. Where people have commented on that novel [The Paper Men], they generally criticize the poor academic, Rick L. Tucker, who is savaged by the author, Wilfred Barclay. I don't think people have noticed that I have been far ruder about Barclay than I have been about Tucker. Tucker is a fool, but Barclay is a swine. The author really gets his come-uppance.

Here'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.

It 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.

I'm really shocked when critics get morally outraged at my fiction because they think I'm condoning what's going on. I never come in as the author and say, "Hey, okay. I'm interrupting the narrator here. I'm Bret Easton Ellis, and I'm the author."

I have relaxed into my persona as an author, although I used to fight that.

President Roosevelt, the author of Social Security, was the first to suggest that, in order to provide for the country's retirement needs, Social Security would need to be supplemented by personal savings accounts.

Against the censurers of brevity. - Something said briefly can be the fruit of much long thought: but the reader who is a novice in this field, and has as yet reflected on it not at all, sees in everything said briefly something embryonic, not without censuring the author for having served him up such immature and unripened fare.

As a writer, author, creator of something the fact that people are still interested, is fantastic.

If 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?

I think we have got to start again and go right back to first principles. The argument I shall advance, surprising as it may seem coming from the author of the earlier chapters, is that, for an understanding of the evolution of modern man, we must begin by throwing out the gene as the sole basis of our ideas on evolution. If there is only one Creator who made the tiger and the lamb, the cheetah and the gazelle, what is He playing at? Is he a sadist who enjoys spectator blood sports? ... Is he manuvering to maximize David Attenborough's television ratings?

Whatever 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.

Don't explain your author, read him right and he explains himself.

The success of many books is due to the affinity between the mediocrity of the author's ideas and those of the public.

Classic author moment, "Oh dear, did I kill that character or not?

The first time I remember our being socially in the same place was after we graduated and [author, investment counselor, philanthropist, and fellow 1950s Yalie] Peter Wolf had a party at his house in the Hamptons.

An author is a fool who, not content with boring those he lives with, insists on boring future generations.

As a writer, its important to stay true to your story without giving a hoot about publishers, critics and readers. You should do your karma as an author the way you want to, and rest is up to God.

The act of reading is a partnership. The author builds a house, but the reader makes it a home.

Every song has a composer, every book has an author, every car has a maker, every painting has a painter, and every building has a builder. So it isn't irrational to take this simple logic a little further and say that nature must have had a Maker. It would be irrational to believe that it made itself.

The theater audience is the ultimate teacher, instructing the actor on the degree to which he has executed both the author's and the director's intent.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter if the author intended a symbol to be there, because the job of reading is not to understand the authors intend. The job of reading is to see into other people as we see ourselves.

One of the agonies of being an author is to know when to stop writing.

The task of an author is, either to teach what is not known, or to recommend known truths by his manner of adorning them; either to let new light in upon the mind, and open new scenes to the prospect, or to vary the dress and situation of common objects, so as to give them fresh grace and more powerful attractions, to spread such flowers over the regions through which the intellect has already made its progress, as may tempt it to return, and take a second view of things hastily passed over, or negligently regarded.

A successful author is equally in danger of the diminution of his fame, whether he continues or ceases to write.

The selection of topics for intensive research has often been a function of serendipitous opportunity. My forays into philosophy of education were largely in response to the prompting of friends and my dissatisfaction with much of what - at that time - passed for philosophy of education. I cannot honestly say that there has been either continuity or an overarching schema, though I suspect ,or at least hope, that someone who looked at my oeuvre might conclude that there was a philosophically integrated author.

Being a Georgia author is a rather specious dignity, on the same order as, for the pig, being a Talmadge ham.

I couldn't really experience being an author when I was still working in publishing - I was trying to negotiate being both. Sometimes the knowledge doesn't translate between the two roles.

I am sure that no traveler seeing things through author spectacles can see them as they are.

I no longer know the author of this book, for simply stopping long enough and writing it down was where I changed from a boy with his eyes squeezed shut to a man with his eyes wide open so that the sunlight might reach my heart despite all that darkness.

If you cannot judge a book by its cover, surely we should not judge an author by one book alone?

In 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.

The prosecutor, who is supposed to carry the burden of proof, really is an author.

I have always wanted to be a published author. I write baseball books because I love the sport.

The author O. Henry taught me about the value of the unexpected. He once wrote about the noise of flowers and the smell of birds—the birds were chickens and the flowers dried sunflowers rattling against a wall.

The meanest authors have at least this similarity with the great author of heaven and earth, that they usually say after a completed day of work: "And behold, what he had done was good.

I think that an author who speaks about his own books is almost as bad as a mother who talks about her own children.

Time made me change. I gradually woke up to the realization that this is who I am, an author, a public figure, and I couldn't just hide in my study, tapping away at the keyboard and pretend that I didn't have a role to play beyond stringing words together.

If you had seen me back in high school, there's no way you would have ever said I would become an author or teacher because I was a horrible student.

What is possible and what is not possible is not objectively known but is, rather, a subjective belief on the part of the author and of the reader.

The history of books shows the humblest origin of some of the most valued, wrought as these were out of obscure materials by persons whose names thereafter became illustrious. The thumbed volumes, now so precious to thousands, were compiled from personal experiences and owe their interest to touches of inspiration of which the writer was less author than amanuensis, himself the voiced word of life for all times.

In every principle presented to us, our first inquiry should be, "Is it true?" "Does it emanate from God?" If he is its Author it can be sustained just as much as any other truth in natural philosophy; if false it should be opposed and exposed just as much as any other error.

For success, the author must make the reader care about the destiny of the principals, and sustain this anxiety, or suspense, for about 100,000 words.

When I started writing after my career as an actor, I knew that that other life in the film industry would be pulled into my writing life and that people would see me not as an author but as an actor starting to write.

The translator of prose is the slave of the author, and the translator of poetry is his rival.

I never wanted to be an author or thought I could be.

Living frugally is one of the best things an author can do to prepare for their career.

Almost anyone can be an author; the business is to collect money and fame from this state of being.